Master realist Subodh Gupta, known for his still lives of kitchen utensils, says over 50 percent galleries across the world show still lives.

'Realism has always been there and will never disappear,' Gupta said.

Concurs Latvian gallerist Yvonna Veiharte, who is showing Renaissance-style portraiture and still life compositions by young contemporary artist Anita Arbidane.

'Most of her works are detailed self portraits. She likes Renaissance art and its decadent and detailed style of painting,' Veiharte said.

Arbidane, 26, shot to the limelight last year with her Renaissance style portrait of the Latvian president titled 'President's Portrait With Rabbit'.

Her works are priced between 7,000 and 9,000 Euros.

Vadodara-based contemporary artist Gargi Raina, who was displaced from Kashmir as a two-year-old, is also a Renaissance realist.

One of her art works -- a panel of nine canvases in water wash technique and dry pastels titled 'Constructing the Memory of a Room' in her childhood home in Kashmir -- uses the Renaissance still life technique to portray individual objects in the room. The panel is priced at Rs.10 lakh.

'Her show with us last year was a runaway success,' Anubha Dey of the Mumbai-based Bodhi Art Gallery told IANS.

'Realism and classical touch in art are back though with a contemporary flavour. Young artists are returning to their figure and line drawing roots,' artist Vivek Sharma told IANS.

Sharma carries realism and still life a step further. His style is photorealism. 'My art is inspired by photography and I try to replicate photographs on my canvas,' he said.

One of his works, 'The Deep', a large format canvas of US president Barack Obama with his head against a chessboard held aloft by Indian god Hanuman, is simultaneously Renaissance and contemporary.

'Obama is as he appears in his photographs whereas the concept and the Hanuman are my idioms,' Sharma explained.

'Realism is good as long as artists develop their own language. I hate works which look the same,' Peter Nagi of the Nature Morte Gallery told IANS.