Art news from the world: Russian art saved from Russians, street art pays an ode to Satyajit Ray, and more

A SUMMARY OF THE MOST EXCITING ART NEWS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

While we focus on Indian art, we can’t obviously function in a vacuum. It’s a small world and everything is connected, especially on the web. So, let’s train our spotlight across the world map to see what’s going on — from art trends to socio-political issues to everything that affects the great aesthetic global consciousness. Or, let’s just travel the world and have some fun!

Ukraine museum scrambles to save Russian art from the Russians

Staff at the main museum in Kharkiv have been racing to get priceless artworks to safety, many of them by Russian artists, even as as Russian forces pound the city with artillery and air strikes. \”There are over 25,000 items in our collection,\” said Maryna Filatova, head of the foreign art department at the Kharkiv Art Museum, adding that it was one of the biggest and most valuable in the country. The ornate, imposing building is still standing, unlike some others in Kharkiv, but the windows have been blown in by the blasts, plaster and dust cover the floors and the surrounding streets are covered in debris. “It is simply irony of fate that we should be saving Russian artists, paintings by Russian artists from their own nation. This is simply barbarism,” she told Reuters last week. The Indian Express encapsulates.

 

In Delhi, an epic collection of Indian and Pakistani art gathers dust…

On the third floor of the 52-year-old Ghalib Academy in Delhi’s Nizamuddin basti, exhibited at the Mirza Ghalib Museum, in a small room anterior to the section dedicated to the eponymous Urdu poet and his era, are paintings by some of some of the most important Indian and Pakistani artists of the 20th century, including MF Husain and Sadequain. “As far as public collections of South Asian modern art go, there are few places in the subcontinent where a Sadequain and a Chughtai can be found on permanent display in the same space as their Indian contemporaries. Crossing the border between India and Pakistan is as fraught an act curatorially as it is physically, complicated by how dominant the category of the nation has been in art history until very recently. The Ghalib Academy collection is all the more unique for its transgression of borders, symbolising the complex relationship between subcontinental nation-states and the cultural forms that unite them,” writes Kamayani Sharma for Scroll, where you can read all about this fascinating venue.

 

Tribute to Satyajit Ray with street art

As part of a beautification drive, the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) has engaged two former students of architecture at IIEST to paint the iron guardrails on median dividers of the area to pay tribute to Satyajit Ray in his birth centenary year. Now, Ayan Roy and Soumyadeep Das are dressing up 3.1km of guardrails with graphic art. A theme has been chosen on bright yellow and grey for each graphic to avoid monotony and bring in vibrance, while the form has been kept simplistic. Whether Feluda or Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen and Hirak Rajar Deshe and other inspirations, all are being brought to life with zest and appreciation. The Telegraph Online elaborates.

 

This 42-year-old artist made over $738K in 32 minutes selling NFTs

Up until 2021, the most money 42-year-old artist Cam Rackam from Huntington Beach, California (USA) had made by selling a piece of his own art was $11,000 for a painting and sculpture piece he sold in 2015. But when he started creating digital art as NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, he sold the entire collection of 10,000 NFTs in 32 minutes after the launch on October 27, 2021. The collection was worth 660 Ethereum, which equaled $2.6 million at the time it sold (as of last week, that amount would be worth closer to $1.7 million). Still, Rackam’s cut that day was $738,593.97. Is this market built to sustain? CNBC.com comments.

 

Not seen in UK for 100 years, two Turner paintings to go on show

Two oil paintings by one of Britain’s greatest artists that have not been seen in the UK for more than 100 years will go on display at the National Gallery later this year. The paintings by JMW Turner are of European scenes that feature the artist’s trademark expanses of water and sky. Harbour of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile and Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening were acquired by the American industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1914 and have remained in the US ever since. The paintings are being loaned for the first time by the Frick Collection in New York and will be on display as part of the National Gallery’s Turner on Tour exhibition this winter. The Guardian tells you all.