T
his July and August, Sotheby’s presents The South Asia Edit, a series of exhibitions celebrating six distinct voices in the story of South Asian modern and contemporary art. The displays highlight the significant contributions made by Francis Newton Souza, Mohan Samant, Bhupen Khakhar, Zarina, and artist couple Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Sheherezade Alam to modern and contemporary South Asian art within the region and its diaspora.
Location:
34–35 New Bond Street
London W1A 2AA, UK
Hours:
13 July–7 August
Monday–Friday | 9:00 AM–4:30 PM
Exhibition Tours Every Tuesday | 28 July & 4 August
11:30 AM | The South Asia Edit
Tour led by Frances Belsham, Sotheby's Specialist
Click below to reserve your place.
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The works on display belong to the artist’s seminal Music & Dance series. Produced between the late 1970s and early 2000s, these works bring together Samant’s lifelong devotion to music and painting, and stand among the defining achievements of his career. Celebrated for his experimental use of materials, Samant simultaneously used paint, paper cut-outs, wire and sand to dissolve the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
A selection of works from the Estate of Bhupen Khakhar – traversing painting, prints, ceramics and sketchbooks – highlights the range of an artist who continually expanded the boundaries of his practice. The exhibition focuses on Khakhar’s experimental printmaking of the 1990s and early 2000s, presented alongside a rare Untitled painting from 1988, offering an important point of dialogue between his painted and printed works.
This exhibition presents Zarina’s later works, bringing together her luminous explorations in gold leaf alongside the monumental Tasbih (2012). Among the central themes of the works on paper are darkness and light, the night sky, stars and constellations. Sourced from private collections, the exhibition reveals the artist’s enduring engagement with materiality, memory and spirituality.
This exhibition brings together works from the estate of the artist, ranging from rare early examples to large-scale canvases of the 1990s. Employing the grid as a framing device, Akhlaq’s work weaves the influences of Islamic calligraphy, architecture and miniature painting, together with the principles of Cubism and Colour Field painting. He created an agile language that defied formal categorisation in its pursuit of spatial exploration.
Alam is considered among Pakistan’s premier ceramicists. Drawing on the silhouettes of traditional South Asian vessels, this selection of thirty-two works belongs to Alam’s practice from the 1990s. Crafted from stoneware and white earthenware, these works combine metallic lustres, speckled glazes and fluted rims.
This focused exhibition of works from the Alkazi Collection of Art examines Francis Newton Souza’s lifelong engagement with Christian imagery, a subject that produced some of the most powerful and psychologically charged works of the artist’s career. Together, these works offer a rare insight into Souza’s artistic imagination and serve as a curtain raiser to a broader exploration of the Alkazi Collection’s remarkable holdings in the years to come.
