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Updated: Apr 17, 2020 12:25 IST

An art gallery in Hyderabad raised Rs 5 lakh for relief work related to the coronavirus epidemic that has already infected over 13,000 persons across the country. At 8am on Tuesday, a charity auction involving 35 original artworks of 27 Hyderabad-based artists went live on Kalakriti gallery’s website.

Titled Art in Isolation, the auction is expected to close on April 17, following which the amount may undergo further revision. While online auctions and art sales, and even online viewing of art works is not a new phenomenon, this is the first time that the gallery has sold any work of art online, promoter Rekha Lahoti said.

All proceeds of the auction will go to the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund.

As on Thursday evening, 20 works had been sold and at least 40 art lovers had bid on works made by a range of artists working across media, including Thota Vaikuntam, Fawad Tamkanat, Laxman Aelay and Nirmala Biluka, among others.

While Vaikuntam, a National Award winner, is known for his paintings that depict the Telangana rural idiom, Tamkanat, the son of famous Urdu poet Shaz Tamkanat, is also renowned as a printmaker. Aelay was already a well known book illustrator in the Telugu literary circles before he trained professionally as an artist, while Biluka is a professor of art as well as a curator.

“In all, 35 paintings of different sizes with a base price range of Rs 10,000 to Rs 380,000, had been put up in the virtual gallery for the art enthusiasts to go through and participate in the auction,” Lahoti said.

Shivarama Chary’s chrome plated fiberglass sculptures were also put up for auction.

After the online tour — designed as though the viewer were standing inside a white cube and seeing the works on a wall — the buyer could click on a work, enter personal information, and place a bid. The estimate included the base (or minimum) price as well as the market price of the work.

For instance, A Rajeshwara Rao’s Kohinoor Hai Kya, an 36”x30” acrylic on canvas has a base price of Rs 120,000 and a market price of Rs 225,000. His work, a riff on courtly miniatures but in a larger format and with a more modern female subject, sold for Rs 125,000 in the auction.

“All the sale proceedings of the e-auction will go to the Telangana chief minister’s relief fund. The buyers can issue cheques directly to the fund. Neither the artist nor the gallery will charge anything,” Aelay, one of the artists whose work is in the auction, said.

The gallery has also chosen to eschew the buyer’s premium, Lahoti said. The buyer’s premium is a percentage of the hammer (or final) price that a winning bidder additionally pays in an auction.

“It is a good initiative by the Telangana artists to contribute their might for a noble cause by auctioning their paintings. They have shown that artists, too, have a responsibility towards society,” Hanumantha Rao Devulapalli, another popular artist from Hyderabad, who conducted exhibitions in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi.

The artworks will be sent to the eventual owners once the lockdown is lifted.

(With inputs from Dhamini Ratnam)