Sotheby’s London Sets Record $26.2M South Asian Art Sale with Nine Artist Records

Sotheby’s London has set a new benchmark for modern and contemporary South Asian art, with its latest sale totaling £19.8 million ($26.2 million)—the highest ever for the category at the auction house. The 73-lot auction on Tuesday achieved a 99% sell-through rate, and 89% of works exceeded their high estimates, according to the house. The previous record of £18.9 million ($25.5 million) was also set in London just one year ago.

The sale established new auction records for nine artists: Antonio Piedade da Cruz, Sunayani Devi, Olinto Ghilardi, Gopal Ghose, Bhupen Khakhar, Dhruva Mistry, Hugo Vilfred Pedersen, Mohan Sharma, and Rabindranath Tagore. “This has been an extraordinary sale for the department—our highest total in history, surpassing the record we set in London only last year,” said Manjari Sihare-Sution, the auction house’s worldwide head of modern and contemporary South Asian art, in a press announcement. “With nine new artist records, the results reflect both the depth of the market and the increasingly international appreciation for South Asian art.”

Top Lots and Record Breakers

The evening was led by Syed Haider (S.H.) Raza’s abstract landscape Paysage Rouge (1960), which fetched £3.8 million (just shy of $5 million)—ten times its high estimate. That makes it the third-highest price ever achieved for the Indian artist, whose auction record remains $5.6 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2024. Raza’s work was the subject of a 2023 Centre Pompidou show, which ARTnews described as revealing “a fascinating life of artistic question and response, battled out on canvas.”

The sale’s 99% sell-through rate and 89% of works exceeding high estimates underscore robust demand for modern and contemporary South Asian art.

Bhupen Khakhar’s undated painting Old Men Playing Chess carried the highest presale estimate of the sale, at £700,000 (about $926,000). It soared past that to sell for £3.1 million ($4.2 million), the night’s second-highest price. The painting, which depicts an orange expanse of landscape dwarfing two elderly men playing chess in one corner, set a record for Khakhar, exceeding the $3.2 million paid for his Two Men in Benares (1982) at Sotheby’s London in 2019.

Maqbool Fida (M.F.) Husain’s undated Mithuna Crimson smashed its £600,000 high estimate, bringing £2.7 million ($3.5 million) to come in third. The seller had paid just $28,350 for the six-foot-wide painting at Sotheby’s New York in 2000, meaning it rose in value some 123,000-fold. Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra) shattered the auction record for modern Indian art at Christie’s New York last year when it sold for $13.8 million. The buyer was Kiran Nadar, one of India’s most important collectors, and a museum devoted to the artist opened in Doha, Qatar, last year.

One other work broke the $1 million mark: Rabindranath Tagore’s Untitled (Head of a Woman), estimated at up to £350,000 (about $463,000), realized £1 million ($1.4 million), a record for the artist. The work had previously sold for $104,500 at Sotheby’s New York in 2008.