Mumbai, Dec. 16: An oil painting by Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde has sold for Rs 29.3 crore, setting a record for Indian art.

The untitled painting from 1995 was bought by an anonymous buyer at a Christie's auction in Mumbai last evening.

"It achieved a world record for any Indian work of art sold at an auction," Christie's International Head of World Art William Robinson said. The painting was one of the last completed in Gaitonde's small barsati (terrace studio) in Nizamuddin, Delhi, before he moved to Gurgaon in 1996.

Gaitonde, born in Nagpur in 1924, passed away in 2001. He is considered one of India's greatest abstract painters.

An official of the auction house, which held its third sale of Indian art in India, told journalists the buyer was "a person from abroad who is not of Indian origin" and had bid over the phone.

The auction was the third for Christie's in India.

Although Gaitonde, known as "Gai" among friends, was part of avant-garde groups of his time such as the Progressive Artists' Group and the Bombay Group of the 1950s, he stood out as a modernist painter of outstanding integrity.

He is best known for his signature canvases in the non-representational mode which he called a non-objective style, and which can be traced to his lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism and ancient calligraphy. This was in direct contrast with his earlier figurative, mixed-medium compositions.

Considered an intellectual, he was an aficionado of Western poetry, cinema, literature and classical music.

Gaitonde was the first Indian contemporary painter whose work was sold for $130,000 at a 2005 Osians art auction in Mumbai. In 2013, one of Gaitonde's untitled paintings sold for $3.5 million (Rs 23.3cr at current exchange rates), setting a record for an Indian artist at Christie's debut auction in India.

In October 2014, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It was titled V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life.