Tag: art

Provenance: Why Should it Matter to You?

Image taken from Kofi Agorsor: The Colours of Life Exhibition on March 2022 at ARTIANA, DIFC

People have been collecting art for the past hundred years, so determining where a piece comes from is often a combination of tracking an artwork’s history and documentation.

Essentially, provenance is a record of ownership of a work of art used as a guide to determine its authenticity and quality. It establishes an artwork’s collectible significance and captures its ownership history all the way back to the artist’s studio.

But why is it so important for art collecting?

1. Establishing the ownership history
Provenance provides an ownership record of an artwork which is a critical foundation for assessing its authenticity. It shows the overview of who a piece has belonged to and where it passed through over time, be it auction houses, galleries, dealers who sold it, and art exhibitions it was shown. Older works, especially those several hundred years old or older, are sometimes given a symbolic seal of approval through a provenance document.

2. Establish the authenticity
Proving the authenticity of art based on provenance was previously seen as an infallible way to verify its authenticity. Now there is more than one way to establish it. However, collecting genuine works of art is easier with provenance. It’s history, even if accumulated for thousands of years, can help verify authenticity, provide buyers assurance and reduce risks in buying.

3. Valuation
Verified provenance can prove the authenticity of a piece and increase its value tenfold, enhancing its collectible status and making it in demand and invaluable.

4. Determine the historical significance of an artwork
An artwork with interesting provenance tells a story of how it changed hands through time, ideally from the artist to its current owner – which might place it in remarkable historical moments or hands of important and famous people. This adds story and gravitas to the pieces by giving them cultural and historical importance.

5. Guide collectors
Knowing a piece of art’s provenance can help buyers determine which pieces are worth investing in. Failing to consider the relevance of provenance documents may cause disputes regarding ownership, authenticity, and value one day. Thus, even where authenticity is not currently an issue, an inaccurate or incomplete provenance could still give rise to a claim in the future. An impeccable provenance can be used to mitigate this risk.

ARTIANA – Highlights – Lot 35 – Classical, Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art – Online Auction – No Buyer’s Premium

Sayed Haider Raza – Srijan – 2007 – acrylic on canvas – 57.5 x 45 in. (146 x 114.3 cm.) – Lot 35

Srijan, prominent artist S.H. Raza’s seminal work will be up the auction block on December 6-10, 2018 in ARTIANA’s South Asian art sale. The artist, one of India’s best colorists, is best-known for works that are densely geometric; inviting viewers into deep meditation and contemplation. 

The focus of SH Raza’s art over the last decades has been to explore and represent the elements of nature, he used the language of symbols and saturated his canvases in geometric shapes and colors to produce powerful works that are contemplative and spiritual. Merging his background and training, he produced work both with deep Indian vision and French plastic mastery, enfolded in modernism yet with the deep resonance of the past. Raza repeatedly revisited his defining themes creating an extraordinary series of meditative and symbolic paintings.

In this piece, Srijan, which loosely translates to creation, Raza’s geometric vocabulary was apparent. Deeply immersed in ancient Indian cosmological symbolism, he celebrated the process of creation in an expansive interplay of visually disparate images sharing a collective narrative. The painting is divided into sections enclosing principle forms, each with strips of colors and variation of aligned triangles, with a black bindu in the upper center of the canvas. Just below that is a pair of bindu in red and blue representing male and female energies – close but not merging into each other. The colors, like most of his works, are remarkably vibrant with a concentration of red, orange, and earthy browns.

Supporting a central idea, Raza wields his unique visual language to reinforce the gestural idioms and philosophical aesthetics of his work. The painting seems to chronicle a story with the different patterned squares coming together to form the whole construct, with each fragment with its own metaphysical significance. The serpent-like painted circles of kundalini forming an unbroken continuity are the rejuvenation and the cyclical nature of life; the Bindu which is the primordial life-force, in turn, connects to germination which is conveyed with the use of triangular yonis; while the symbols of fire, water, earth, wind and sky embody elements that sustain life. The interconnectedness of the key components of the universe simplified in Raza’s canvas.

Auction Catalogue – South Asian Art ‘Classical, Modern and Contemporary’ – December 6-10, 2018