Meet the Indian art patrons placing their country at the heart of a global story

Source Art Basel by Shaikh Ayaz
Sunil Kant Munjal has likely shared this story before, but it’s worth repeating because it involves the two great loves of his life: his late wife Mukta and the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, which he has proudly nurtured for a decade. He borrowed the name ‘Serendipity’ from the bookstore Mukta used to run at the Claridges Hotel in New Delhi. ‘The store eventually shut down but I managed to retain the name,’ smiles Munjal. It is a word that perfectly ‘symbolizes the festival,’ insists the 68-year-old chairman of Hero Enterprise and founder patron of the Serendipity Arts Festival. ‘In many ways, “serendipity” is about luck, but also about infinite possibilities and chance connections. Anyone who has been to the festival knows that it is full of surprises and there are always new discoveries waiting to happen at every corner.’ Since its first edition in 2016, the annual Serendipity Arts Festival has become a defining fixture on India’s thriving cultural calendar, attracting over one million local and international visitors to date. The immersive festival – which describes itself as ‘inclusive, accessible, and democratic’ – has supported 10,000 artists, created 5,000 project-based job opportunities, and helped restore a number of historic Portuguese-era buildings across Goa’s capital Panjim where it is held every year, usually in December. Those numbers speak volumes about the quiet power of private patronage and the central role that globe-trotting, culture-loving entrepreneurs like Munjal are playing in the development of India’s creative economy. India, they say, is an old civilization but a young nation. Munjal couldn’t agree more: ‘When we got independence in 1947, we were busy building the country.’ Cultural patronage was not a top priority. ‘But today, with our economy booming, the arts sector is once again getting the attention it deserves,’ says Munjal.
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Indian artist Arpita Singh dies at 89

Source Artsy by Katie White
Arpita Singh, the modernist painter whose dense, densely populated canvases traced the inner and political lives of Indian women across six decades, died Monday at Fortis Hospital in New Delhi. She was 89. Her husband, the artist Paramjit Singh, told the Press Trust of India the cause was an age-related ailment. “She had heart and lung-related issues for some years now,” Paramjit said. “However, she was actively working. Her health dipped in the last three days, and she was admitted to the hospital.” Singh was born in 1937 in Baranagar, in what is now West Bengal in India. She grew up amid India’s struggle for independence and the violent 1947 partition, themes that would recur throughout her work. Later, major national inflection points, including the 1975 state of emergency and the economic liberalization of the 1990s, also shaped her worldview. Singh’s paintings were commonly built around an ambiguous female protagonist, surrounded by fragmented texts, flowers, vehicles, and domestic objects of everyday urban Indian life.
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The enduring Indian tradition of visual storytelling

Source The Hindu by Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta
A line is a dot that went for a walk, said Paul Klee, about the line that draws the eye along the space of an artwork. Visual storytelling through the moving line—a narrative in sequence—appeared much before the printed page. Early Buddhist monuments such as Sanchi and Bharhut bear narrative reliefs. The murals of Ajanta narrate the lives of the Buddha across cave walls. In later temples, episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata run in friezes around the sanctum. Devotees read them while circumambulating, turning the act of walking into an act of reading. Curated by the graphic novelist Amruta Patil, the exhibition “A Moving Line: 1500 Years of Indian Visual Storytelling” (July 25–November 15), at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, brings together a thoughtfully assembled collection of works to follow the trajectory of India’s graphic storytelling tradition across 1,500 years. Artefacts such as the colourful kaavad and carefully etched pattachitra scroll sit alongside the bright colours of Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle. Twentieth century staples such as Chacha Chaudhary, Phantom, and Tintin sit cheek by jowl with Tagore family caricatures and Satyajit Ray illustrations.
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Jogen Chowdhury: The Enchantment of the Everyday

Source The Punch Magazine by Nawaid Anjum
Any work of art — abstract or real, old or contemporary, small or large — ultimately needs to have transcendental qualities. It’s a dictum Jogen Chowdhury (1939-2026), one of India’s most dynamic and multi-faceted modern artists, swears by. His works, spanning over six decades and exploring the enchantment of the everyday, are all intimations of transcendence. As art critic, curator, collector and author Ina Puri underlines in an incisive essay that features in the catalogue for the show. “The recurrent theme of gruesome wounds and mangled limbs portray his agony yet again in the vividly painted images of severed fingers or that of a nude body with a gash across its torso. Disturbing yet riveting, these images are a powerful comment on the recent history of our country, visual narratives that lastingly sear the imagination of the viewer,” she writes.
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A memory: Bhupen Khakhar and Jogen Chowdhury.

A wonderful memory: this photo I took with Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003), Jogen Chowdhury (1939-2026), Richard Long, and Denise Hooker in Bhupen Khakhar's guest house in Mumbai in 2001.
Grand souvenir, cette photo que j'ai faite avec Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003), Jogen Chowdhury (1939-2026), Richard Long et Denise Hooker dans la chambre de la guest house de Bhupen Khakhar à Mumbai en 2001.

Peter Nagy—Nature Morte gallery founder who transformed Indian contemporary art market—has died

Source The Art Newspaper by Kabir Jhala
Peter Nagy, the US-born gallerist and artist whose experimental taste shaped Indian contemporary art, has died, aged 67. Nature Morte, the Delhi- and Mumbai-based gallery he founded, confirmed his death yesterday (13 October) on social media, writing that “he passed away after a long illness”. Nature Morte's Instagram post announcing Nagy's death says that “he lived exactly as he chose: fearlessly, irreverently and wildly free. He had no patience for convention for its own sake, and endless patience for ideas.” The galleries remain open in line with Nagy's wishes. “Peter was clear that, when the time came, the gallery should not close its doors in mourning. To him, an exhibition was never about the gallery. It belonged to the artist who had poured themselves into it and to everyone who came to see it. He believed an artist’s moment should never be put on hold.’"
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The Vayeda Brothers and a Constellation of Ideas

Source Art Guide by Jo Higgins
The brothers, proud Indigenous Warli artists from the rural village of Ganjad, Maharashtra, north of Mumbai, are working on one of 16 new artist commissions that will feature in Task Eternal, the largest of five exhibitions opening as part of the new Western Sydney museum in late 2026. Their enveloping, room-scale circular wall work, Aabhjag आभजग (There is a world above us) (2026) is the only one being made entirely on-site. “Experiencing and exploring and decoding the stories of our culture, we had a lot of encounters sitting with the shamans and understanding the stories of space and how they visualise these energies; the deities and spirits of our energies,” explains Mayur. Working with three young Warli artists they brought with them from Ganjad, Aabhjag आभजग (There is a world above us) draws from several lunar mythologies and cosmological creation stories that tell of celestial energies, space travel and the gathering of seeds from different kingdoms to build the earth. Having mapped out the work in their minds, the painting process itself is quite organic. “We have an understanding of the composition, the idea is there, and then Tushar starts from the right and I start from the left and then we merge in the middle.”
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Maximiliano Modesti on why India must claim its place in global luxury

Source Hello by Duhin Ganju
A woman embroidering chikankari in Lucknow, Maximiliano Modesti says, can earn an average of ₹3,500 a month. A Dries Van Noten T-shirt can sell for around ₹5 lakh. Couture dresses can command US50,000. Schiaparelli gowns, he adds, can reach US500,000. Somewhere between those figures lies the uncomfortable economics of luxury fashion — and the reason Maximiliano has spent the better part of three decades arguing that India needs to claim more of what it creates. “We always romanticise fashion, craft, and luxury,” he says. “But it is a business.” For 33 years, the French-Italian fashion and craft entrepreneur has built bridges between India’s artisan communities and some of the world’s biggest luxury houses. Through Les Ateliers 2M, the production and craft platform he founded, he has worked with renowned names like Hermès, Alaïa, Chloé, and Dries Van Noten, while the Kalhath Institute in Lucknow, which he established in 2016, works to strengthen the livelihoods and business understanding of India’s artisans.
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Gond Artist Jangarh Singh Shyam Hits $2.15-Million Record at Mumbai's Pundole Gallery

Source The Wire by John Elliott
Indian modern art sales took a gigantic leap this week when an auction at the Mumbai-based Pundole gallery moved the star focus from the traditional top names like M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza to indigenous art with a work by Jangarh Singh Shyam being sold for a record hammer price of Rs 18 crore. That is approximately $2.15 million, including Pundole’s (generous) 15% buyer’s premium, more than six times a $303,000 record set for the artist just five days earlier at Saffronart in Mumbai, which beat a $91,000 sale at Pundole in 2023 and far exceeded prices around $30,000 or far less in earlier years. “Jangarh has left his footprints and legacy in the history of Indian contemporary art,” says Alka Pande, a leading curator, who has written a book about him. “He brought alive the magic of his ancestral village of Patangarh and initiated a style of painting which has come to be known as the Jangarh Kalam. The prices of the Jangarh Kalam at the recent auction is a tribute to his creative genius”.
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'Art is a place of tolerance': How artist Kader Attia is shaping the next Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Source Firstpost by Faizal Khan
t the second edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014, moon landings and space shuttles showed up on the walls of the Aspinwall House that sat elegantly on the waterfront in Fort Kochi, the heritage town of Kerala on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The images of space missions were the works of French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, who had mounted more than two dozen paintings of old postal stamps issued by countries in Africa and West Asia. Titled “Independence Disillusionment”, Attia’s sprawling installation explored the evolution of nations, from instruments of colonialism to those marching towards modernity, a recurring theme of his artistic practice that connects history and development. More than a decade later, Attia is marking his own evolution at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale by shifting his status from a participating artist at its second edition to the curator of its seventh iteration next year. This week, he made his first public appearance as a curator in Kochi, using the occasion to forge a personal bond with the people and the place. Revealing his humble roots in an impoverished Parisian suburb where he grew up, Attia gave a glimpse of the socio-economic factors that shaped him as an artist very early in life, when he made his own toys and sharpened his artistic skills as he worked in a nearby market to contribute to the family's meagre earnings.
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On Raqs Media Collective

Source Eflux by Kamayani Sharma
The physics, politics, and poetics of time have been one of the central interests of the collective’s practice since it was formed in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Monica Narula, who met as students at New Delhi’s A.J.K. Mass Communication Research Centre (MCRC). Inspired by the sight of a man dancing at the shrine of thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Nizamuddin Auliya, they named themselves for the dervish’s ecstatic whirl—the raqs or dance in Urdu, Farsi, and Arabic—citing “kinetic contemplation” as their animating philosophy. The Leh curation highlights how their practice engages the trans-Himalayan terrain and history, both ancient and contemporary.
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A Biennale At The Edge Of The World

Source Grazia by Payal Mohta
Ladakh has long existed in popular imagination as a place of extremes: An adventure playground of soaring mountain passes and stark landscapes, monasteries and meditative silence, and a sensitive border region shaped by the realities of war and security. This August, it acquired another identity – as the setting for a new chapter in contemporary art. The inaugural sā Ladakh Biennale, originally scheduled from August 1-10, has been extended until August 31 following an enthusiastic response from local communities, allowing its conversation with the land to continue a little longer.
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The Kalhath Institute celebrates its 10-year anniversary with a gallery show in Mumbai

Source Architectural Digest by Shaikh Ayaz
Maximiliano Modesti fell in love with “everything about India” on his very first trip in 1993. But it was with Indian craftsmanship and the karigars (artisans) engaged in embroidery and textile-related art that he ultimately forged a lifelong bond. Although the market for luxury brands was nonexistent when he first arrived here, Indian crafts felt truly opulent and far superior to anything he had seen in Europe. “It was obvious to me from the beginning that Indian embroidery was a class apart,” recalls the cofounder of Lucknow’s Kalhath Institute, which won the prestigious AD x JSW Prize for Contemporary Craftsmanship in 2018. The exhibition features hybrid works born from a collaboration between Kalhath’s master embroiderers and artists like Yassine Balbzioui, Amina Benbouchta and T Venkanna. These craft-based experiments reveal aspects linking ancestral knowledge and contemporary design aesthetics, urging the viewer to see embroidery as works of art.
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Professor Knut A. Jacobsen argues that Ravi Varma was the undisputed founder of a genre he terms the “God poster industry.”

Source Daily Jstor by
Varma’s popularity grew at the height of the British Empire in India, as Western-style oil painting, with its emphasis on depth and chiaroscuro, gained prominence in the country. He began by painting grand portraits of royal and noble figures from across India and later turned to scenes from Hindu mythology in his work, becoming the first Indian artist to gain a nationwide audience. In “Indian Painting from 1825 to 1900,” published in the 2011 volume Masters of Indian Painting II: 1650-1900, independent researcher Tryna Lyons describes Varma as “the first of India’s ‘gentleman artists’” because, “at the time that he made the daring decision to learn the craft of painting, artists enjoyed roughly the same social status as tailors and cabinet makers.” His paintings and oleographs, produced by his own printing press, came to define Hindu religious iconography in India. Professor Knut A. Jacobsen, in his 2004 article, “The Child Manifestation of Śiva in Contemporary Hindu Popular Prints,” published in Numen, argues that Ravi Varma was the undisputed founder of a genre he terms the “God poster industry.” This genre took on a vibrant life of its own and remains popular today.
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India On Paper: Priya Paul's Love Letter To Bazaar Art

Source Elle India by Upasana Das
Ravi Varma himself didn’t anticipate the success of his mass-produced oleographs which drew from Hindu mythology; As his Malayalam biographer Balakrishna Nair would later write that there were only a few well-to-do houses where the artist’s works weren’t found. Perhaps it was to capitalise on this unprecedented popularity that the British Unilever company resorted to using reproductions of his works while trying to “Indianize” their product — Sunlight soap. For the company’s 1935 calendar they placed bars of soap at the feet of Vishnu from one of Ravi Varma’s oleographs, almost as if it were a votive offering. They weren’t alone in this strategy as we see in another calendar from 1940 in Paul’s collection advertising the Kerala Sandal Soap manufactured by British-established Kerala Soap Institute in Kozhikode. Oversized packets of soap were cleverly placed underneath Lakshmi’s outstretched hands which poured out coins – again reproduced from a Ravi Varma oleograph – intended to appear as if the soaps were gifts from the goddess herself.
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Nilima Sheikh 'Fractured Skies' MoMA NY Sep 27, 2026–Jun 13, 2027

Source MoMA
“The artist’s role is to bear witness—to both the past and the present,” says Nilima Sheikh. Over the course of her five-decade career, Sheikh has transformed narrative painting as a new way of engaging with history, highlighting lived experiences, illuminating regional stories, and foregrounding women’s voices. Her research-based art practice draws on a vast array of historical accounts, archival materials, and literary sources. Adapting the traditional scroll format and painting primarily in casein and gum temperas, Sheikh weaves together image, text, and stenciled patterning to create multilayered narratives that unfold as interconnected vignettes. Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies brings together selections from her series Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14) and Home, Land (2023–25) alongside Shahid (Witness) (2025–26), a new, site-responsive set of paintings making its debut at MoMA.
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What’s next for South Asian art? Christie’s Damian Vesey on the market’s evolution

Source Luxebook by Indu Joshi
We are certainly seeing growing participation from institutional and museum-level buyers, as well as non-diaspora collectors, particularly for works of strong historical significance. There has always been a natural bias towards buyers from the region or its diaspora, which is consistent across many collecting categories. We are no longer seeing interest driven by a narrow group of collectors – instead, there is a widening base of engaged buyers who are deeply informed about the historical and cultural importance of these works. The collector base today is markedly more informed and historically engaged than it was during the mid-2000s boom. We are seeing a growing number of collectors who have taken the time to study the field in depth, reading the available literature and revisiting historic auction catalogues that go back decades. This is a very positive development for the market. It reflects a move away from short-term speculation towards more considered and sustainable collecting, grounded in knowledge and connoisseurship.
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“ We are not part of nature. We are nature ”

Source Online Catalogue
Mayur and Tushar Vayeda are two brothers born into the Warli tribe, one in 1987 and the other in 1992. Their grandfather founded the first school in their village of Ganjad (Maharashtra, India), and their mother is a teacher. Both pursued higher education in Mumbai, one in management, the other in multimedia. After their studies, the two brothers decided to leave the megalopolis to return to their native country and participate in the revitalization of their own culture. They returned to drawing, as they did daily with the other children in the village. Their artistic approach consists of creating a dialogue between the animist culture of their tribe, the interdependence of humans and nature, and the ecological challenges facing our planet. > read more

Indian Gallerist Sundaram Tagore Credits Friendships for His International Success

Source Artsy by Gautami Reddy
Né en 1961 au sein d’une des familles les plus influentes culturellement en Inde, Tagore a grandi à Jorasanko Thakur Bari, la maison ancestrale de sa famille à Calcutta, dans l’est de l’Inde, avant de vivre entre Santiniketan et Delhi. Jorasanko était également le lieu de naissance de son arrière-grand-oncle Rabindranath Tagore, le poète, éducateur et peintre qui, en 1913, devint le premier Asiatique et le premier non-Européen à remporter le prix Nobel de littérature. « Calcutta, ancienne capitale de l'Inde britannique, était une ville exceptionnellement cosmopolite », se souvient Tagore. « Peu de gens savent que la première exposition du Bauhaus hors d'Europe s'y est tenue en 1922, présentant des œuvres de Paul Klee et de Wassily Kandinsky aux côtés de celles des plus grands artistes modernes indiens. » La maison de son enfance attirait un défilé incessant d'intellectuels, de militants politiques et de personnalités culturelles.Son père, Subho Tagore, appartenait à ce milieu. « C'était un poète, un peintre et un rebelle à sa manière », explique Tagore. En 1943, Subho a contribué à fonder le Calcutta Group, un collectif d'artistes modernistes précurseurs qui rejetait le romantisme au profit d'un langage visuel plus urgent et socialement engagé. Ses artistes vendaient leurs œuvres pour financer le mouvement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la lutte pour l'indépendance de l'Inde et la famine du Bengale de 1943 – une catastrophe, aggravée par la politique coloniale britannique, qui fit des millions de victimes.
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Discover online 27 years of passion for contemporary Indian art through 27 souvenir images and 27 exhibition photos

Source India 20 Years of Passion "Since 1996, my passion for contemporary Indian art has led me to organize dozens of exhibitions in Delhi, Paris, New York, and elsewhere. I had the privilege of meeting two legends of contemporary Indian tribal art, Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jivya Soma Mashe, with whom I worked for over twenty years. Thanks to Abhay Maskara, I had the privilege of meeting and working with T. Venkanna and Shine Shivan, two of the most unique contemporary Indian artists of their generation. Today, I continue this adventure with Maximiliano Modesti and the gallery we created together in Brussels. We are currently exhibiting at the Palacio Duques de Cadaval (Évora, Portugal), until October 25th, a selection of works we have both collected over the past 25 years." Hervé Perdriolle
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Christie’s Kiran Nadar exhibition offers unique panorama of Indian art

Source Eastern Eye by Amit Roy
Those who want to learn about modern and contemporary Indian art by visiting just one exhibition should head – now – to Christie’s in King Street in London to see The Meeting Ground, a collaboration between the UK auction house and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi. Eastern Eye joined one given by Premjish Achari, who began by introducing himself: “I am a curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and in short form, we call it KNMA. It’s located in New Delhi, and it is South Asia’s largest private museum. We started as a museum collecting the modern and contemporary art of South Asia, and from there we expanded to around 20,000 objects. So from modern and contemporary, now we are also collecting folk, indigenous, antiquities, and miniatures. This (selection for London) is a very small percentage of that collection. This represents the modern, contemporary, indigenous, and folk. It’s also intergenerational.”
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Contemporary Now 2026 turns Chennai into a city-wide gallery, tracing the present through living histories of art

Source Indulge Express by Anoushka Kundu
What makes a work of art contemporary? Is it the moment it is created, the materials it employs or the questions it dares to ask? Contemporary art rarely offers definitive answers. Instead, it asks how the past continues to live in the present. That thought runs through Practices in Continuum: Tracing the Present, the curatorial theme of Contemporary Now 2026. For 20 days this month, Chennai will become a city-wide gallery. Across galleries, artist studios, and cultural spaces, 66 artists and seven leading galleries from across the country will bring exhibitions, performances, walkthroughs and conversations to the city.
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Unbound Forms at the Hepworth: how Indian and Bangladeshi artists turned craft traditions into contemporary sculpture

Source The Conversation by Hannah Sabapathy
Craft traditions are often imagined as practices rooted in the past: carefully preserved techniques passed from one generation to the next. But Unbound Forms at The Hepworth Wakefield reveals a more dynamic story. Bringing together the work of five pioneering women artists from India and Bangladesh, the exhibition shows how materials such as textiles, metal, ceramic, wood and paint can be transformed into works that honour inherited skills while pushing them into new territory. The artists in the exhibition lived through a period of enormous change. Four were alive when India gained independence in 1947, while Mrinalini Mukherjee was born just two years later, in 1949. Their work emerged from the newly formed nations of India and Bangladesh, where traditions of making, craft and cultural identity were being reasserted.
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Sip in the silence as you walk through the immersive works of these 3 artists in New Delhi

Source Architect and Interiors India
What does solitude look like today? In a world increasingly defined by speed, noise, and constant connectivity, A Slow Sip of Solitude invites audiences to pause. Presented by Gallery Pristine Contemporary, the exhibition brings together twenty -three works by three Indian artists, Varad Bang, Ayuesh Agarwal, and Salony Garg, whose practices explore the quieter dimensions of human experience: introspection, mindfulness, stillness, and the search for presence.
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Kiran Nadar on a landmark exhibition from her museum collection

Source Christie's

Kiran Nadar on a landmark exhibition from her museum collection: 'Art can do what politics and public discourse often cannot — it creates space for empathy’
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INDIA CHEGA AO PALÁCIO DUQUES DE CADAVAL

Source Lux Deco
O Palá­cio Duques de Cada­val, em Évora, trans­for­mou-se uma vez mais num lugar de encon­tro entre dife­ren­tes geo­gra­fias, tem­pos e for­mas de expres­são artís­tica. A expo­si­ção ‘INDIA’ reúne cerca de quinze artis­tas con­tem­po­râ­neos indi­a­nos, pro­ve­ni­en­tes de con­tex­tos urba­nos e de comu­ni­da­des tri­bais, numa expo­si­ção que revela a com­ple­xi­dade e a riqueza de um ter­ri­tó­rio onde tra­di­ção, espi­ri­tu­a­li­dade e expe­ri­men­ta­ção con­vi­vem lado a lado. Mais do que uma apre­sen­ta­ção de arte con­tem­po­râ­nea indi­ana, a expo­si­ção pro­põe uma mudança de pers­pe­tiva: olhar para a Índia não como uma rea­li­dade única, mas como um con­junto de múl­ti­plas vozes, his­tó­rias e lin­gua­gens. Entre prá­ti­cas liga­das a gran­des cen­tros urba­nos e cri­a­ções pro­fun­da­mente enrai­za­das em tra­di­ções ances­trais, INDIA cons­trói um diá­logo onde dife­ren­tes for­mas de cri­a­ção coe­xis­tem em igual­dade. A esco­lha do Palá­cio Duques de Cada­val acres­centa uma dimen­são sim­bó­lica ao pro­jeto. Ins­ta­lado num edi­fí­cio com sécu­los de his­tó­ria, o espaço aco­lhe uma expo­si­ção que revi­sita uma rela­ção igual­mente longa entre Por­tu­gal e a Índia, mar­cada por via­gens, inter­câm­bios cul­tu­rais e encon­tros que con­ti­nuam a encon­trar novas for­mas de expres­são no pre­sente. A expo­si­ção estará patente até 25 de outu­bro, no Palá­cio Duques de Cada­val, em Évora.
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Craft finds a new voice

Source Mumbai Mirror by Sapna Sarfare
A decade after its launch, Lucknow’s Kalhath Institute is challenging who gets recognised as an artist, one embroidered work at a time For generations, Indian embroidery has travelled the world attached to luxury labels, couture houses and museum collections. The names remembered, however, have rarely been those of the people whose hands created the work. That imbalance sits at the heart of Kalhath Institute, a Lucknow-based organisation that has spent the past decade trying to change how Indian craftsmanship is valued, taught and understood. Founded in 2016 by textile expert Maximiliano Modesti and Mohammed Amine Dadda under the Kalhath Foundation, the institute treats traditional embroidery as more than inherited skill. It encourages artisans to study the history of their craft, engage with contemporary artists and discover their own creative language. To mark its 10th year, Kalhath has partnered with designer and architect Rooshad Shroff for an exhibition at Gallery Rooshad Shroff in Ballard Estate, bringing together embroidered artworks, archival photographs and pieces created through its Artist-in-Residence programme.
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India Palace of the Duques of Cadaval Evora Portugal Exhibition until October 25, 2026

In the 1970s, otherness—the recognition of the other as a distinct being, carrying a culture, ideas, or experiences different from one's own—was at the center of the concerns of Indian artists and intellectuals. In 1982, the Bharat Bhavan was inaugurated in Bhopal, the first museum to present in a single venue artists from the subcontinent's major art schools alongside those from folk and tribal cultures. The Évora / India exhibition at the Palace of the Duques of Cadaval is part of this school of thought and brings together eighteen contemporary Indian artists from the most diverse cultural backgrounds.

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The art of painting Urdu

Source Scroll.in by Shweta Upadhyay, Impart
It was Zarina Hashmi (1937-2020), known professionally as Zarina, who first used Urdu text prolifically in her works. Ahmadzai acknowledges Zarina’s influence on Nafas; in fact, one of the letters in the series is titled Zarina ke Naam, in which she pays homage to the artist. The wounds of Partition had left a profound, pit-deep sense of homelessness in Zarina. Her works are replete with whimsical borders, skeletal houses, pitch-black margins that drag you in their vortex of darkness. They refer to the deracination wrought by Partition that separated her from her parents and siblings who moved to Pakistan. In an interview, Zarina had noted that words preceded images in her practice. Some of Zarina’s works that foreground Urdu language are part of the show Urdu Worlds (2026) at the Ishara Art Foundation in UAE. Curator Hammad Nasar writes in the curatorial note that Zarina thought she was “too Muslim for the US and India, and too Indian for Pakistan.” Instead, she considered herself an “Urdu artist.”
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Christie’s London Sale Confirms Growing Appetite for South Asian Art

Source Artnet by Richard Whiddington
In its first London sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art in seven years, Christie’s achieved £18.9 million ($23.9 million). All of the 93 lots, which came from a single private collection, sold above their presale estimates, resulting in the most successful sale of its kind that Christie’s has staged in the British capital. The collection had been formed across the 1990s and 2000s and included statement works from some of the pioneers of modern South Asian visual culture. “The sale reflects something deeper than strong material,” Varun Kaji, a prominent South Asian art advisor, said over email. “This collection was assembled with real conviction, and the market responded accordingly.”
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This is Indian art’s golden moment. It’s important to not stay stuck in the past

Source The Indian Express by Trisha Mukherjee
Having made a big splash at the Venice Biennale after seven years, Indian art is ready for its next major milestone with yet another landmark exhibition: ‘The Meeting Ground’, presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) at Christie’s London. An impressive survey bridging “modern and contemporary practices with folk and indigenous artistic traditions from South Asia,” it is perhaps the biggest showcase of Indian artists since ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998’ at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2024. The KNMA show does attempt to diversify by including folk and indigenous traditions through the works of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jivya Soma Mashe.
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Indian Summer: As regional tensions grow, South Asian artists make connections in London.

Source Ocula by Debika Ray
For Venkanna himself, whose first solo institutional exhibition in London follows a presentation at Frieze in 2025, London is attractive because it brings together audiences from many parts of the world. “But as an artist, I try not to think too much about markets,” he says. “Last year, I met collectors from Europe, the United States and Asia, as well as curators and museum professionals. The response gave me confidence that, while the work emerges from my own experiences and surroundings, the questions it asks are not limited to one place.”
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Korwa Drawings: Adivasi Expression at the Edge of Language

Source The Wire by Impart
The Pahadi (Hill) Korwa are a distinct sub-group of the Korwa of central and northeastern India, who belong to the Munda ethnic group; they are a designated Scheduled Tribe, and further classed as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG). Most live in the Vindhyadri mountain range that cuts across Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, in the Raigarh and Surguja districts respectively. Historically they were known to be skilled hunters and also foraged and practised shifting cultivation. In modern India, the livelihood of many Pahadi Korwa depends variously on small-scale settled agriculture and livestock rearing, and the foraging and sale of produce and firewood from forests, while others are landless labourers often subject to exploitation and marginalisation. In 1983 Swaminathan, then the director of Bharat Bhavan, organised a visit to the Pahadi Korwa in Surguja and Raigarh as part of the institution’s drive to document the cultural production of Adivasi artists in the region and collect artworks for its museum Roopankar. The initial team of field researchers he sent — selected art students from government colleges who had been oriented and trained — noted the Korwa’s interest in their notebooks, pens and crayons, and their keenness to use the materials. When Swaminathan arrived later with fellow artists Jyoti Bhatt and Anil Kumar, he began making sketches of the community leader and his wife with pen on paper, as an attempt to establish some form of communication given his lack of knowledge of the Korwa language. On his prompting, several of the villagers then produced drawings over a period of days. This was done as a community activity, though they worked individually on large sheets of paper with the pens, pencils, markers, brushes they were provided. They are seen in photographs drawing with the paper laid flat on the ground. Later the same year, Swaminathan wrote about the experience and published the drawings in his book The Magical Script. The drawings were exhibited at Bharat Bhavan in 1985. In 1996, Jamme came across the drawings there, and later travelled to the Pahadi Korwa villages, accompanied by a support team including a translator, to collect more drawings in a similar exercise. These, along with the drawings made in 1983, form the complete extant collection of Korwa drawings today.
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‘Shocking? It’s only what you see in ancient temples’: painter T Venkanna on his joyous carnivals of copulation

Source The Guardian by Cleo Roberts-Komiredd
TVenkanna’s paintings land like a sucker-punch. At the centre of his first institutional solo show at London’s Studio Voltaire is an overbearing altarpiece, modified by two squat side panels to take the overall shape of a juvenile dick drawing. Perched at the bottom, on either side, are Adam and Eve. Their backs are turned as they look out on an orgasmic thicket of desire. A female figure is pleasured by another’s nose, someone copulates with the hindquarters of an animal and others fondle in a kaleidoscopic blur of colours and styles that make Hieronymus Bosch look restrained. But carnal enjoyment is merely the footnote. “It is a way to consider many things, including the myth of religions,” says Venkanna. Scattered within this longing landscape are stony figures redolent of India’s pantheon of gods and goddesses. Women worship a topiary lingam – the aniconic depiction of Shiva – and a man caresses a statuesque woman’s breast (while drinking from her vagina). Graphic? “That is what you see in ancient temples,” says Venkanna. “People touch the breasts of sculptures so that over time they become very smooth and shiny.”
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Bijoy Jain And Studio Mumbai: The Indian Architect Redefining Sustainable Luxury Design

Source Outlook by Aaron Jacob
uxury has become a strange thing. Once upon a time it meant hand-carved stone, timber shaped by skilled craftsmen and homes built to survive centuries. Today, it often means touchscreen panels controlling automated curtains, buildings wrapped entirely in glass and enough electronic systems to launch a small satellite into orbit. The result? Structures that require enormous amounts of energy merely to remain comfortable. Buildings that seal themselves off from nature while claiming to celebrate it. Homes that somehow feel less human despite being packed with more technology than ever before. And then there is Bijoy Jain. While much of contemporary architecture is obsessed with speed, scale and spectacle, Jain has spent decades pursuing something far more radical: slowness. Not the fashionable sort of slowness discussed in design conferences, but genuine architectural patience. Buildings that breathe naturally. Spaces that age gracefully. Structures designed not to dominate their environment but to belong to it.
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India’s Kiran Nadar Museum to stage major South Asian art exhibition at Christie’s London this summer.

Source Artsy by Katie White
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) will present a major exhibition from its collection at Christie’s London this summer, marking the first time the auction house’s annual exhibition series has been dedicated to a South Asian institution. Titled “The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection,” the exhibition will run from July 16th through August 21st at Christie’s King Street headquarters. Organized in collaboration with the auction house, the exhibition will feature works from the New Delhi–based museum’s collection spanning modern and contemporary art, alongside folk and Indigenous artistic traditions from South Asia. Works by artists including M.F. Husain, Sayed Haider Raza, F.N. Souza, and Jangarh Singh Shyam will be featured.
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Nalini Malani’s Venice Biennale 2026 exhibition confronts violence, myth, and motherhood

Source Hapers Bazaar by Radhika Iyengar
Malani’s Venice installation comes to life at the Magazzini del Sale, a 15th century salt warehouse complex belonging to the Renaissance. With its nine large arched doorways, discoloured terracotta bricks and a wooden trussed roof, Magazzini del Sale is brimming with character. This warehouse of yore overlooks the historical waters of the Giudecca Canal that once served as a passageway for boats carrying salt. Malani, who is known to carefully consider the architectural anatomy of the sites where she exhibits, will project the animations onto Magazzini del Sale’s walls. “The history of the site is very important to me because I work with the space, not just a white cube,” she says, noting that she visited Magazzini twice last year for recce and rehearsals. In the course of our conversation, she reveals herself to be an avid reader of Greek mythology, sharing snippets from tragedy, and occasionally, offering nuggets of trivia: for instance, the word ‘salary’ comes from the word ‘salt’, she informs, once a precious monetary commodity. In the universe Malani creates, complex myths and their narratives no longer remain distant or opaque—they are distilled through a lens to gauge what is happening now.
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How Dayanita Singh Organized a Major Show in Venice

Source Hyperallergic by Hrag Vartanian
This show continues that career-spanning goal. After giving herself the challenge of achieving all this without major corporate or commercial gallery funding — though she was able to get funding for shipping from her India-based institutional partner — Singh bartered and negotiated her way into Italian archives from Naples to Venice. She found individuals along the way that she calls patrons who helped support her passion for photography’s new frontiers, unmoored from the anchors of deep pockets that hinder her imagination. “It was an experiment to see if it was possible to really work with the friendship economy and make something outside the very commerce-driven biennale time,” Singh told me during our video interview last week, now online. “We couldn’t afford PR, so I wasn’t expecting anyone to come, and that’s fine too. Even if nobody comes, I did it. But people are coming.”
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Kader Attia to Curate the 2027 Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Source Art Asia Pacific by Yuqian Fan
The Kochi Biennale Foundation has named Algerian French artist, curator, and scholar Kader Attia as curator of the seventh edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which is scheduled to open in 2027. Born in Dugny in 1970 and based between Berlin and Paris, Attia examines the ongoing ramifications of colonialism through installations, films, sculptures, and archival research, often articulated through his long-term engagement with the concept of “Repair.” He is a professor of time-based media at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and has been recognized with the Marcel Duchamp Prize in Paris (2016), the Joan Miró Prize in Barcelona, and the Yanghyun Prize in Seoul (both 2017). In 2022, he curated the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. In a statement, Attia said he looks forward to drawing on Kochi’s layered cultural histories to frame both art and dreaming as forms of “repair,” adding that both the biennial and Kerala offer “the space-time to reclaim our sovereignty over our dreams.”
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A collector’s guide to Ganesh Pyne

Source Christie's
As a teenager, Pyne discovered the paintings of the Bengal School, established in the late 19th century by Sunayani Devi and Abanindranath Tagore. This nationalist modern art movement promoted a romantic, symbolist style based on Indian mythology, using ink wash and tempera. ‘You can see their influence in his early paintings of the 1950s,’ says Avari, ‘but very quickly Pyne starts to move on. The works become more existential in theme, reflecting the post-colonial crisis of identity India was experiencing at the time.’ Pyne’s paintings are metaphysical and suffused with a primeval darkness. ‘There’s a “lost world” quality to them that is timeless,’ says Avari. Ganesh Pyne was once described by the journalist and film-maker Pritish Nandy as a man who ‘radiated a mysterious quality’. He was an intensely private artist who rarely gave interviews, which meant clues to his personality were often sought for in his paintings, charged with the supernatural. ‘He raises the ghosts of the past,’ said the actor Barun Chanda in the documentary A Painter of Eloquent Silence.
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In lines French art critic and cur­ator Hervé Per­dri­olle’s book takes read­ers into the world of Warli mas­ter Jivya Soma Mashe

Source The Hindu by Shailaja Tripathi
French art critic and curator Hervé Perdriolle first met Mashe in the late 1990s, and what began as a search gradually turned into a long, enduring friendship. Over the years, Perdriolle spent time with Mashe in his village, observing not just his art but his way of living. Despite language differences, their connection grew through shared time, gestures and a quiet understanding. This led to a book on Jivya Soma Mashe. Created over decades, the book brings together rare images and personal memories. During an interview, Perdriolle talks about documenting with care Mashe’s life and art(Roli Books India).
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Vaccine billionaire buys $17.9m Raja Ravi Varma, setting new record for Indian painting at auction

Source Gulf News by Stephen N R
A 19th-century masterpiece by Raja Ravi Varma has sold for a record $17.9 million at an auction in Mumbai, setting a new benchmark for Indian art and underscoring its growing global value. The oil-on-canvas painting, Yashoda and Krishna, was auctioned by Saffronart on Wednesday, far exceeding its estimated price of $8.6 million to $12.9 million. The work — depicting the Hindu deity Krishna with his mother Yashoda — is now the highest-priced modern Indian artwork ever sold at auction, as well as the most expensive Ravi Varma painting globally. The painting was acquired by industrialist and vaccine tycoon Cyrus Poonawalla after an intense bidding contest.
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Life in Bombay through the lens of Raghubir Singh at Jhaveri Contemporary

Source Stir World by Chahna Tank
Running from March 12 – April 25, 2026, the solo exhibition brings together a selection of works by the Indian photographer who captured the rhythms of urban life in a city constantly reshaping itself—in colour. Shot on 35mm film, these raw and vivid images register what Singh described as “the several forces working in Bombay,” in a conversation with British writer V. S. Naipaul for his book Bombay: Gateway of India (1994). “It is a go-ahead city. There is tremendous movement and energy,” he noted. Born in Jaipur into an aristocratic family, Singh was largely a self-taught photographer who was influenced by illustrious figures such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and William Eggleston, as well as Indian visual forms like Rajasthani miniature and Mughal paintings. While he lived and worked across Hong Kong, Paris, London and New York—collaborating with publications including National Geographic, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time during his prolific career—it was in the streets of India that his photographic practice found its most defining expression, to which he kept returning. Working in colour at a time when black-and-white still dominated the medium, he emerged as an instrumental figure in Indian street photography—a flâneur, meandering around with his camera, trying to capture the polyphony of urban life in cities like Calcutta, Rajasthan, his native state, Varanasi (especially Ganges) and the unreal city that was Bombay.
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What to See During New York’s Asia Art Week

Source Hyperallergic by Rhea Nayyar and Isa Farfan
Nearly 100 20th- and 21st-century works coalesce for Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art auction this spring, bringing an explosion of color and culture from the subcontinent and its diaspora. Anchored by Tyeb Mehta’s “Gesture“ (1970), this painting-forward sale brings together quintessential works by Jamini Roy, M.F. Hussein, Satish Gujral, Sheila Makhijani, and Arpita Singh, among others. Cubism, Fauvism, and Minimalism are intertwined with Tantric painting, experimental figuration, and culturally and religiously significant motifs. Catch the five-day preview at the Rockefeller Center before the live sale!
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Raghubir Singh Bombay

Source Ocula
Jhaveri Contemporary is proud to present Raghubir Singh: Bombay, a solo presentation of photographs by the late Raghubir Singh. A pioneer of analogue colour street photography, the exhibition chronicles the city between the late 70s to mid 90s. Singh saw this process as crucial, as much so as the shooting. While his street photography was bound by an element of chance and accident, often demanding a quick response, editing was a way to dwell. Editorial choices helped Singh to, he said, ‘trap the movement on the street, in relationship to...static elements.’ Time too was spent studying colour, contrasts and form. Before the era of digital enhancement and filters, Singh produced images, like Victoria Terminus, Bombay (1991), that pop. His masterly use of colour was essential to expressing India. He explained, ‘The fundamental condition of India...is the cycle of rebirth, in which colour is not just an essential element but also a deep inner source, reaching into the subcontinent’s long and rich past.’
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Masters' Strokes: Rohit Chawla photographs India's finest artists in the solitude of creation

Source Open by Sohini Dey
To Rohit Chawla, who made this photograph, the artist is a refresh­ing voice in a country squeamish about sex. “An artist like Venkanna surprises me with his humility and talent—the fact that a man living in a joint family, with very traditional parents in Hyderabad, creates the most wonderful erotic and provocative works,” he says. Venkanna is one of the 62 artists in Chawla’s new book, Portrait of An Artist (280 pages, `2,500), published by Mapin Publishing in association with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. The culmination of a decade-long undertaking, which had Chawla slipping inside the studios of India’s most legendary artists and brightest emerging names, the book features more than 100 photographs with much of the accompanying text by writer and curator Kishore Singh.
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The Great Indian Art Mafia

Source The New Indian Express by Dr Alka Pande
A major controversy came into light in November 2010 when the Bengaluru-based auction house, Bid and Hammer Auctioneers Pvt. Ltd., auctioned the 120-year-old painting Jatayu Vadham by Raja Ravi Varma. After acquiring the artwork, Nadar commissioned a technical evaluation, which concluded that the painting was a duplicate. Instances of art forgery in India are not uncommon. In 2009, renowned artist SH Raza attended an exhibition of his own works at the Dhoomimal Gallery in Delhi. To his shock, the then 86-year-old artist discovered that several pieces displayed were counterfeit. Similarly, in 2008, a Mumbai gallery owner was arrested for selling forged works attributed to artist Subodh Gupta. Earlier, in 2004, two paintings by Anjolie Ela Menon that had been sold through a South Mumbai gallery were later identified as fakes.
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The Indian art market is rising once more – is growth sustainable this time?

Source Art Basel by Cyrus Naji
The Indian art market is reported to be booming. More art is being sold today in the country than ever before, and for higher prices – a sea-change in the market evidenced by the repeated shattering of auction records: last September, a single sale at the New Delhi auction house Saffronart made USD 40.2 million, while, in March, a 1954 painting by the Modernist master Maqbool Fida Husain sold for USD 13.8 million at Christie’s in New York. With the Indian economy experiencing strong growth (the IMF recently upgraded India’s 2025–26 GDP growth from 6.6% to 7.3%), there is every chance the current upswing in the market will be sustainable, but buyers’ tastes remain cautious, focused on bankable names and conventional genres. And, of course, we have seen the Indian art market boom before, around 20 years ago. So, what makes today so different?
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India Art Fair 2026: What to expect from one of South Asia’s leading art events

Source QG India by Sanjana Ray
The idea of a systematic approach to art may sound like blasphemy, but let’s be honest — art, especially when encountered in the scale and density of the India Art Fair, can be overwhelming. You might have four days to wander (leisurely and directionlessly) through the cultural sprawl at Delhi’s NSIC grounds, but we’ve mapped out a guide anyway, so you can move through the experience with intention — and time to spare.
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