London-born Indian contemporary artist Bharti Kher’s sculpture of an elephant was auctioned just shy of £1 million at Sotheby’s contemporary art sale on Monday evening. Forty-one-year-old Bharti, who is married to fellow contemporary artist Subodh Gupta, had created the bindi and fibreglass life-sized female Indian elephant in 2006. The sculpture called, The Skin Speaks a Language not its Own, was estimated to sell for £700,000-1,000,000, but was sold for £993,250.
The sale price has set a record for Bharti Kher’s work and a new record for any work by a contemporary female Indian artist at auction, Sotheby’s said after the sale. Kashmir-born Raqib Shaw’s The Garden of Earthly Delights III, which was auctioned for £2,708,500 in October 2007, holds the record for the highest price paid for contemporary Indian work of art. Bharti Kher’s previous auction record was for Landscape (triptych), which sold for £198,500 in April 2008. New Delhi-based Bharti, who moved to India when she was 23 years old, took 10 months to complete the sculpture of the female elephant.
The sale of the sculpture comes just days before more that 280 elephant models will be auctioned in London to raise funds for Asiatic elephants.
“This is a work which took Bharti Kher ten months to create, every fold and recess of the sunken form is meticulously contoured by the intricately arranged patterns of thousands of bindis that organically swarm across the beast in a second skin.