Patel’s pricey painting

Off Lamington Road, painted by Gieve Patel, went under the hammer for a whopping £ 149,000 (Rs 1,43,87,992) though the estimated price was £ 30,000 (Rs 28,96,911) to £ 50,000 (Rs 48,28,185). The auction, for Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art, was conducted in London by Sotheby’s on October 6, 2015. The oil on canvas painting, created between 1982 and 1986, was acquired by its previous owner around 1993-94 from the person who had originally purchased it from the artist.

The painting Off Lamington Road; (right): artist Gieve Patel

Patel, who is also a poet, playwright and physician, had his clinic on Lamington Road in central Bombay and the painting emerged as "a series of portraits, and one can see in the canvas a dozen individual studies… I had this feeling of space, each individual head could have a canvas to themselves, also this idea that man must be both part of the crowd and by himself,” the artist is quoted in Sotheby’s Catalogue Note. "In the eighties I had for some time been thinking of doing a painting of a crowd in a Bombay street… It would take four years to complete… When I could work through, the figures seemed literally to flow out of the brush. Everything that I knew about the streets of my city came to my aid. In Bombay the street is an extension of home, and as we know, is sometimes the only home. The emotional range expressed by the crowd was intoxicating, from serene presence to happy camaraderie, to destitution and misery, all in close proximity to each other.”