Stellar International Art Foundation and Shapero Modern are pleased to have completed a successful exhibition of works by the late, great MF Husain at Shapero Rare Books in conjunction with India Art Week, June 2015.
This was Stellar International Art Foundation’s first London exhibition and featured heretofore-unseen Paintings and Drawings from within Stellar’s own collection over the three floors of this longstanding Mayfair Institution.
The presentation preceded the Indian Art Auctions which were also on view, reinforcing an active programme of Indian art in the community during this summer season.
Stellar International Art Foundation has the largest collection of MF Husain’s works outside of the estate – making it the most important warden of his oeuvre. Work from The Collection spans his entire career and includes large, and sometimes entire, bodies of some of his most significant series including Ramayana, Our Planet Called Earth and most importantly, Maria.
This was the first true survey of the Artist’s work from across his career and various media practices ever to be staged in London– one of the cities he called his home in his later years.
Alongside the paintings and drawings from the collection, visitors were able to preview Stellar International Art Foundation’s seminal publication on the artist: MF Husain: The Journey of a Legend. This raisonné is not only the first since the artist’s demise, containing plates of the over 250 works within Stellar’s collection, but includes important new scholarship on the Artist as presented by the research and interviews of curator and critic Kishore Singh.
Husain was himself a scholar of Indian history and philosophy, and it is fitting for his work to appear alongside the maps, atlases, and studies of his native land amidst Shapero’s rare, vintage holdings.
Guests at the vernissage included the Choudhrie family, famed artists Paresh Maity and Jayasri Burman, Silvia von Ballmoos, Princess Ingrid Frankopan, London based artist Hugo Dalton and other collectors of Husain from London and abroad.
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“Husain’s work has a monumentality that this generation cannot hope to grasp, being close to the subject and from seeing the artist up close. In decades to come, he will be studied for each brush stroke and every tone of colour, for his subjects and his inspiring vision. He will move beyond mere markets, into the realm of the great artists of the world.”
– Kishore Singh, MF Husain: The Journey of a Legend, August 2014
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Photo Courtesy: Stellar International Art Foundation and IES Photography
