Main image: El Dorado console, brass, patinated gold, Vikram Goyal. (Vikram Goyal Studio)
For collectors and investors, the thing that’s purchased isn’t really the thing. It’s the story behind it that matters. Let’s say you own a Picasso, one of the 20,000 works of art he produced over his 73-year career, according to The Met’s modest assessment. Now if your Picasso also hung in his first exhibition in Barcelona in 1900, when he was 17, that’s the kind of compelling narrative that turns collectors’ heads.
With someone as prodigious as Picasso, the story behind a piece matters even more. So choose a tiny sketch from when he was preparing Guernica or a still life dated the day in 1936 (Picasso more or less dated every pair of socks he wore) when he met Dora Maar, one of his more important muses. The thing you purchase isn’t the thing, it’s the story you can tell about it that ultimately holds value, and not just in terms of passable cash.
When an artist begins their period of burgeoning, before they’re drenched in fame, what collectors are already looking for is the story. One art practitioner with a story worth hearing is Vikram Goyal.
Vikram Goyal studied engineering before working in finance for six years at Morgan Stanley. Then in 2000, with the dotcom bubble bursting, he committed to a long-held ambition to enrich the Indian art market by forging conceptual contemporary designs in metal through legacy artisan techniques. (Stephane Aboudaram/Vikram Goyal Studio/Nilufar | Vikram Goyal Studio)
Practitioner rather than artist? In the same way Andy Warhol had a factory and Damien Hirst a studio of technical assistants manufacturing his designs. “My intervention,” he says, “is to have organized a workshop model, where 20 master craftsmen work under me, with a multi-generational team of artisans under them.”
The El Dorado console (main image above) illustrates the scale of Goyal’s imagination. It conjures the legendary city of gold that drew Spanish conquistadores to search for it in present-day Colombia and Venezuela. But Goyal draws the viewer’s eye also to a distinctly Indian patterning of sinewy curves redolent of the flowing life-force of Hindu deities. The work may be golden but is brass.
Brass (an alloy of copper and zinc for those who skipped metal class that day) is Goyal’s favored medium. As designer rather than artist, Goyal’s concept pieces exploit his engineer’s knowledge of the material. “It’s more malleable, more versatile than gold, and can be patinated in different ways.”
India has a depth of craft like no other country in the world – from textiles, silks, embroideries and weaves to woodwork, cane and, of course, metal.
The studio creates massive wall plaques, sculptures and large-scale functional works, as well as smaller decorative pieces of more intricacy than one would might associate with brass. The team practice the repoussé technique – meaning that indentations are made in sheet metal using hammers and punches worked from the reverse side, instead of the more predictable method of sand-casting or using lost wax molds. In this way finished pieces flow with greater artisanal instinct.
Works are typically commissioned as customized one-offs by corporate and private clients, with the studio typically working alongside architects and project designers. At the PAD London design fair in Berkeley Square in October 2024, Goyal exhibited limited-edition consoles and cabinets. To complement his major-scale pieces, he’s also recently launched a homeware brand called Viya that lets the flair of his designs shine in a domestic dimension.
Goyal’s Song of the Forest and Ra series comprise mirrors, lighting sconces, screens and this bowl, all in patinated gold. Counterpoint to his traditional Indian monolithic works, here delicacy and fragility receive expression in a slightly more accessible form. (Vikram Goyal Studio)
A private client may say, ‘I love this panel, could you make it into a table,’ or want a piece with a deity they’ve seen us produce or a multi-layered forest with abstract elements too.
A signature collaboration with the London house of de Gournay – whose bespoke hand-painted wallpaper is created definitively at the fine art end of artisan – sees a series of wall panels, designed by Goyal and executed by de Gournay in bas relief on gold-gilded paper. The panels depict the Silk Road and stand as backdrop to plinths exhibiting Goyal’s Garden of Life repoussé vases. The whole is an exquisite representation of what artistic symbiosis can achieve.
The story that Vikram Goyal’s imagination tells is of how a nation’s traditional craftsmanship – in this case India’s long heritage of intricate metalworking – need not merely mark the past. In the right creative hands, it can stand as a platform for contemporary reinvention. Which is exactly what one piece by Goyal neatly demonstrates by way of another story.
He may be some way from reaching Picasso’s 20,000 works, but his wall lamp Picasso’s Quartet is a witty rendition of all those flattened guitars and violins of Cubism that the Spanish master played so perfectly. Goyal’s own orchestra is just tuning up.
Picasso’s Quartet, wall lamp, Vikram Goyal, 2023. (Filippo Pincolini/Vikram Goyal Studio/Nilufar)
From an interview by Steven Short in London, October 2024.
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