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Peter Nagy, New York artist and co-founder of Delhi's Nature Morte gallery, opens up the international art arena to India's new crop of top contemporary talent.
As India takes its place as an emerging player in the global art boom, New York artist Peter Nagy of New Delhi's Nature Morte fans the flames of Asia's prolific contemporary art scene.
Peter Nagy, a successful artist in his own right and co-founder of New York's Nature Morte gallery, pioneered the city's East Village art scene in the 1980's, creating a postmodern oeuvre related to art-historical themes in a highly graphic, conceptual style. A decade later, he relocated to India. Drawn by a wealth of culture and a burgeoning contemporary art scene, in 1997 he resurrected Nature Morte in New Delhi, establishing himself as a key figure in the country's proliferating art boom. In 2003, he forged an alliance with Bose Pacia Gallery in Manhattan, the first Western gallery to specialize in contemporary South Asian art. Last month, the partnership launched Bose Pacia Kolkata. The new venue aims to fill the artistic void within the city of Calcutta, as well as serving as a valuable testing ground for fledgling artists.
Today Nature Morte presents India's leading artists, such as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher and Jitish Kallat—both at home and internationally—showing in leading fairs around the world, including The Armory Show in New York, the Dubai Art Fair and Paris's FIAC. At this year's Art Basel, the gallery will present the collaborative art duo Thukral & Tagra.
Peter Nagy's definition of luxury
The synthesis of quality, integrity, creativity and beauty, abetted with ample time so as to be properly appreciated.
If luxury were an object, what would it be?
A cold glass of orange juice on a hot day.
If it were a person?
A great conversationalist with a wide knowledge of many subjects.
A place?
In front of a truly great painting.
A moment?
I love that moment when you are just starting to fall asleep, and you have a sudden flash of a dream you had the night before but had never remembered anything about all day. That reconnection with last night's dream is gone in a second, but it opens up the space for tonight's dreaming. Does this happen to everybody, or just me?
As a pioneer of New York's East Village art scene in the 1980's, are there many differences or similarities to what you are doing now, over 20 years later, in Delhi?
When I started becoming involved with the contemporary art scene in India in the mid-1990s, many of the ideas and issues that were pertinent in New York in the Eighties (appropriation, gender and sexuality, reproduction and information technologies, strategies of representation) were beginning to become integral to many artists' practices in India. For that reason, I found a great deal of work that interested me and related to my own work and background. Today, with a booming art market within India and international interest increasing in Indian contemporary art, at times it does feel very much like the heady, big-money days of New York in the Eighties.
Did being a successful artist in New York have its advantages when setting up Nature Morte in New Delhi?
Yes, as did running a successful gallery in New York too. But I think it also maybe worked against me, in the sense that I may have been trying to do things in a New York way, and it's a very different culture. Also, the art scene was at a very immature level at that point, and I was actually rather naïve about how conservative the market was. Even now that we have a booming art market here, it's still an inherently conservative market and is still fixated on painting.
Who are biggest collectors in India at the moment?
At the top of the heap is the Poddar family. They are an extremely sophisticated and cultured family. This summer they will open a building for their collection. There will be space to display works from their collection, but they will also be commissioning new projects by young artists. In terms of international models, they are really the only ones, but then there are some others, such as Rajshree Pathy from south India, who has become an extremely adventurous and serious collector, also in the hope of someday opening a museum for her collection. As the scene develops, we are also seeing more young collectors in their thirties. These are people who have traveled internationally, so now when they travel, they go to the Tate Modern, or the Venice Biennale, then I think they come back and they get a sense of the scale and the scope of the international art world, and they want to make more things happen here.
You have just opened a new gallery in Calcutta, in collaboration with New York's Bose Pacia Gallery. Do you have any further planned?
We've talked about the possibility of a gallery in London, but right now with the Calcutta space being brand new and also with doing so many art fairs, we really can't take anything else on. In fact, we are going to do more art fairs. Next year we'll also do Tokyo and a new fair in Shanghai.
How did you get involved with Bose Pacia?
I was looking for new partners, and I had been working with Bose Pacia because they were in New York and we'd become friends. I was setting up some shows for them and acting as their talent scout, because they were showing Indian art in New York, but they could only come to India once a year or so. I was writing catalogues for them and organizing summer group shows, so we'd had a nice long gestation period. At that point, they had also moved from a very small space in SoHo to a much more serious space in Chelsea. They realized that they needed a formal partnership with a gallery in India, just to help them with things like shipping, so we both needed each other. It made sense.
There has been talk of introducing a biennale in New Delhi. Do you think that it is ready?
Frankly, I am not a big fan of the biennale form. I'm not big fan of these gigantic group shows; I believe it leads to too much art all at once and becomes rather unfocused. Certainly, if the biennale happens here, I will support it just for the cultural life of the city, but I think that what would benefit Delhi more is something like the establishment of an institute of contemporary art, where you have a permanent institutional setup on a relatively small scale, to show extremely young and experimental art by Indian and international artists.
What are you working on?
I have almost no time for my own art work these days, though there is always something in the works. I do hope to get back to it in more depth in the future. But for now, my work as a gallerist, curator, and critic in India is very creative and deeply fulfilling.
What is inspiring you at the moment?
The sustained creativity, coupled with business acumen, of such mavericks as John Galliano, Rei Kawakubo and Miuccia Prada.
What is your favorite work of art?
I guess I'll be greedy and say Brancusi and his entire studio at the Centre Pompidou. As with the best art, the work is incredibly personal while also being universal; it looks completely effortless, when we know it certainly was not.