Indian Art Boom Generates $96 Million in Two Weeks’ Auctions

Source The Wire John Elliott
There’s a boom in the modern Indian art market with sales totalling £96.2m at international auctions in the past fortnight. Saffronart, the market leader, almost doubled the maximum total for an Indian auction to $40.2m, while Sotheby’s and Pundole each totalled $25.5m and $18.3m with Christie’s trailing at $12.4m. All four were celebrated as “white glove” sales, where all the lots were sold. Top prices have been achieved for a variety of artists. They were inevitably led by members of the ultra-safe Bombay-based Progressives Group, which began in the 1940s, with names such as F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain and V.S. Gaitonde. Records were also set however for later artists including Bhupen Khakhar, Mohan Samant, Arpita Singh Vivan Sundaram and Nalini Malani who have been attracting increasing interest at auctions, though there were few works from contemporary artists.
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The largest M. F. Husain museum, set to open in Qatar, is inspired by the artist’s own sketch

Source Vogue India by Asma Siddiqui
Before MF Husain’s star began to rise in the 1940s, he couldn’t afford proper canvases. Instead, he would paint Bollywood film hoardings overnight, working on giant billboards barefoot, perched precariously on bamboo scaffolding. Rumour has it that he sometimes used leftover paint from these signboards for his own artworks. That early ingenuity gave Husain’s art their bold, larger-than-life strokes, and also explains why, even decades after he became India’s most famous painter, he almost always walked around barefoot. The largest M. F. Husain museum set to open in Qatar is inspired by the artists own sketch. 14 years after his death, Husain’s art has continued to speak to people—even though NFTs and AI have threatened the very axis on which human creativity spins. In March this year, the force of his impact on the art world was felt when ‘(untitled) Gram Yatra’, Husain’s 1954 masterpiece spanning nearly 14 feet, which had remained largely out of public view for decades, sold for $13.8 million at Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art auction in New York, making it the most expensive modern Indian artwork ever auctioned.
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Mumbai Art Gallery Owner, Artist Booked For Obscenity

Source The Draft by Manu Shrivastava
The episode fits into a long lineage of confrontations between faith, morality, and artistic liberty in India. Only earlier this year, an exhibition of MF Husain’s works in Delhi’s DAG gallery drew protests alleging sacrilege, reviving memories of the relentless criticism Husain endured through the 1990s and 2000s, a pressure that eventually drove him to leave India. Just a few months prior, the Bombay High Court delivered a ruling that underscored the other side of the debate. In a case involving the seizure of works by F N Souza and Akbar Padamsee, the court released the paintings, censuring enforcement agencies for lacking the cultural and aesthetic literacy to assess modern art. Nudity or provocation, the court reminded, cannot be simplistically equated with obscenity. Together, these episodes reveal the fraught and fragile space within which India’s art community operates - caught between legal strictures, religious sensitivities, and public morality. For Gallery Maskara, what began as an avant-garde exhibition has now snowballed into a high-profile case, thrusting once again into the spotlight the recurring debate over whether art in India can be both fearless and free.
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Jivya Soma Mashe Book Available

This book is the first dedicated entirely to the pictorial work of Jivya Soma Mashe (Author: Hervé Perdriolle). Jivya Soma Mashe (1934-2018) is the legendary figure of the Warli tribe (Maharashtra, India). Abandoned at a young age by his family, Jivya Soma Mashe took refuge in drawing and adopted the pictography specific to his community to develop a personal style that would garner the admiration of his family, and later of regional, national, and international authorities. He received his first National Award from Indira Gandhi in 1976. Paintings by Jivya Soma Mashe were first exhibited in 1975 at the historic Mumbai gallery, the Chemould Gallery. Some of them are featured in the famous catalogue of the exhibition "Magiciens de la terre" at the Centre Pompidou in 1989 and others were present in 2014 for the thirtieth anniversary of the Fondation Cartier. Some of his large paintings will be on display in the inaugural exhibition of the Fondation Cartier's new premises, opposite the Louvre Museum, from the end of October 2025. Language: EN/FR. Format: 19.5 x 26.5 cm. Pages: 256. Binding: Hardcover. Illustrations: 150 color illustrations. Publisher: 5 Continents Editions (Europe-USA) – Roli Books (India)

Padma Shri awardee struggling to make ends meet in Bihar: Folk artist urges jobs in schools to promote heritage preservation among youngsters

Source Bashkar English
In Jitwarpur, famously known as the village of master craftsmen, the colourful walls speak of centuries of Madhubani painting, but the lives of its artists are marked by despair, poverty, and neglect. Despite earning Padma Shri, National Awards, and international acclaim, many artists here still struggle to secure necessities like housing, ration cards, and permanent employment. With the Bihar Assembly elections due in November, artists are once again making their demands heard. Their call is clear: recognition alone is not enough; they want sustainable livelihood, government support, and respect for their art. Bindi Devi, an artist from Jitwarpur, bluntly states: “The art to which we have dedicated our entire lives cannot even provide us with two meals a day. Politicians only come during elections, fold their hands, and disappear for five years.” Even celebrated Padma Shri awardee Shanti Devi expresses similar anguish. Despite international recognition and invitations to prestigious events like the G20, she says she still doesn’t have a ration card or a proper house. “I met Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, and even travelled to Denmark with my art, but till today, I haven’t received benefits from a single government scheme. Even a Padma Shri recipient hasn’t got a house,” she laments.
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Jodhpur Arts Week Edition 1.0 Centers Craft in Contemporary Practice

Source Observer by Christa Terry
Jodhpur Arts Week, which launches its Edition 1.0 next month, is a contemporary art festival as well as an exploration of authorship, memory and place. While the upcoming edition, which runs October 1-7, is ostensibly the first, it builds on last year’s Special Projects Edition, which, in a successful proof of concept, drew a crowd of 45,000 to Rajasthan’s Blue City. Having tapped curators Tapiwa Matsinde and Sakhshi Mahajan to helm this year’s festival, the Public Arts Trust of India (founded by philanthropist and collector Sana Rezwan) is now looking to create something more enduring: a model of cultural programming that proactively contextualizes contemporary practice through convergence with the living local heritage. Many of the international artists and designers who trekked to the edge of the Thar Desert for Jodhpur Arts Week have been working with the city’s master weavers, embroiderers, metalworkers and woodcarvers.
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Delhi exhibition highlights India's controversial slum redevelopments

Source The Art Newspaper by Amrita Singh
Timeme Mohanty, a three-year-old boy in Delhi, struggled to pedal his bicycle in a circle for days. When he finally succeeded, he yelled: “I rescued speed altogether.” His father, the artist Paribartana Mohanty, thought this was an absurd statement, and hence, an apt title for his solo show, now on view at the Delhi gallery Shrine Empire. The exhibition comprises 12 large paintings and three moving-image works, produced during eight years in which Mohanty documented and researched the demolition of the Kathputli art colony. “All demolitions, at least for me, are absurd acts,” the artist says. Forced evictions and demolitions targeting marginalised communities for “redevelopment” are not new in India. One such case was the Kathputli colony, a slum cluster in west Delhi, which had a rich history spanning decades. Known as one of the world’s largest settlements of street performers—puppeteers, acrobats, magicians and musicians—large parts of the colony were razed by late 2017 as part of a redevelopment drive.
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Bollywood Star Sonam Kapoor on the Women Who Shaped Her Eye for South Asian Art

Source Artnet by Margaret Carrigan
Sonam Kapoor is an actor, a fashion tastemaker, and, increasingly, an art collector. The aesthetic eye that drew her to film and fashion has also informed her growing art collection, one she said “began instinctively,” shaped by early exposure to South Asian modernists. "My first purchase was a work by Manjit Bawa. He’s a modern master, and I’m obsessed with his use of color. His subject matter was so deliberate, and it really spoke to me. I bought it in 2006. My most recent purchase is a piece by Jangarh Singh Shyam. He was a non-metropolitan artist credited with creating a new school of Indian art called Jangarh Kalam in the 1980s and I absolutely love his work—it’s sublime, beautiful, and so detailed."
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Kochi-Muziris Biennale Sixth edition: For the Time Being

Source E-flux
The Kochi Biennale Foundation is delighted to announce the dates and curatorial framework for the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Titled For the Time Being, the edition will open on 12 December 2025 and run for 110 days, until March 31, 2026. The international exhibition, alongside a diverse programme of talks, performances, workshops, and film screenings, as well as key verticals including Students’ Biennale, Invitations, Art By Children and the Residency Programme, will take place across various sites in Kochi, India. Kochi-Muziris Biennale is India’s first and South Asia’s longest-running contemporary art biennale. The sixth edition is curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, an artist-led organisation based out of Goa. The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an invitation to embrace process as methodology, and to place the friendship economies that have long nurtured artist-led initiatives as the very scaffolding of the exhibition.
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The City Palace in Jaipur to host first gallery-curated show.

Source Artsy by Maxwell Rabb Jaipur’s City Palace has an illustrious history: a royal residence and former administrative headquarters for the Indian region. Now, for the first time, a single gallery—Los Angeles’s Rajiv Menon Contemporary—is curating an entire show in the Palace. “Non-Residency,” a group exhibition at the Jaipur Center of Art, is based in the Palace and will explore what it means to be part of the Indian diaspora. The presentation, which opens August 9th and runs through September 8th, marks the first time the Jaipur Centre for Art (JCA) has partnered with a single gallery on a full exhibition. It is also Rajiv Menon Contemporary’s first project in India and the first show at the palace curated by an American. Menon, who launched the Hollywood location of his gallery earlier this year, focuses on contemporary perspectives from South Asia and the diaspora.
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Indian Modernist Tyeb Mehta’s Market Is Soaring. How High Will It Go?

Source Artnet by Eileen Kinsella
Amid an upsurge in demand for Indian art, Mehta’s market his hot. His two highest prices at auction have come this year, and collectors should be prepared to spend big to acquire a major work, since he was not at all prolific. He produced only around 200 canvases, and prestigious institutions and private collections hold most of the key ones, experts say. In April, the Mumbai-based Saffronart auction house sold Mehta’s Trussed Bull (1956) for $7.2 million, the most ever paid for one of his works on the block. It’s an important work that reflects his lifelong fascination with bulls, depicting in unflinching detail the brutal treatment that he witnessed them receive at slaughterhouses.
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‘Jangarh Kalam from Patangarh Continued’ on exhibit at Triveni Kala Sangam

Source The Statesman
Patangarh — a village in Madhya Pradesh home to many talented Gond artists — was the place where artist-anthropologist J Swaminathan at Bharat Bhavan discovered the late Jangarh Singh Shyam. Now, 30 original artworks (out of a collection of a total of 50 works) created by 18 Gond artists in the stylistic genre pioneered by Jangarh, are on view at the Triveni Kala Sangam from June 30 to July 10. Jangarh’s style, named the “Jangarh Kalam” — in the early eighties, encouraged and inspired Jangarh, a community singer, to paint. The imagination transformed from musical to visual. While the Gonds were not known for their art, Jangarh gave birth to a new art. His work, characterized by meticulous dotting, fine line work, and the use of vivid colors, depicts fantastical beings, deities, flora, and fauna. The landmark group exhibition titled “Jangarh Kalam – Continuing in Patangarh” is organized by the Raza Foundation, in association with Triveni Kala Sangam and supported by Progressive Art Gallery, and is open to all.
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Air India Art Collection at NGMA Bengaluru carries a whiff of nostalgia

Source The Hindu by Ruth Dhanaraj
Once upon a time, there was a maharajah who flew around on his private jet, sharing glimpses of India with people all over the world. And whenever he returned to his country, he would come laden with tales of the many wonders he had seen during his travels. The Maharajah (for that was his name and title) has long been the mascot for Air India, the country’s national carrier; though, over the years, his role has been diminished and he is rarely seen in public. For those who remember his glory days, or wish to relive the nobility of a bygone era, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bengaluru (NGMA-B) is displaying art from the Air India Collection. Air India started collecting works of art and cultural assets in the early ‘60s — a time when modern Indian art needed the patronage, says Darshan, who not only curated the show but also conceptualised its design and display. Photo : An ashtray designed by surrealist master Salvador Dalí
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A London exhibition reflects on shared South Asian histories and splintered maps

Source Stir World by Samta Nadeem
India and Pakistan gained their independence from the British in 1947, but what is more remarkable than the celebration of a contested freedom is the memory of an excruciating partition. I was born somewhere in the middle of our partitioned history to date, a little shy of half a century after the two nations declared freedom and yet The Radcliffe Line, clumsily and hastily drawn, seems to have sketched my most important and complex lessons in history, geography, identity, politics and pain – a condition not unique at all but personal to so many. Since secondary school, I have stared at the political map of our region to imagine who our neighbours would’ve been if South Asia were one alliance, how it would have redefined our relationships with major geopolitical forces like Russia, China or the West? To walk into an exhibition in the heart of London that erased all these lines, curatorially and metaphorically, was an experience I had to sit with.
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Sarmaya debuts on Mumbai’s Heritage Mile

Source The Hindu by Barru Rodgers
In South Mumbai’s ‘Heritage Mile’, home to many colonial buildings, including the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, there’s a hidden gem. It is Sarmaya’s new outpost, which opened last month on the second floor of the 146-year-old Lawrence & Mayo building in Fort. The 3,500 sq.ft. space, once home to a bank, now houses the decade-old hybrid museum’s archive — a repository of art, artefacts, and living traditions from across the subcontinent. With large arched windows, floor to ceiling bookshelves, exposed wooden beams, and comfortable chairs strewn about, it is cosy and welcoming. A gorgeous Gond painting on the wall looks on as visitors quietly research or browse the pieces on display.
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25 years ago, Saffronart founders Dinesh and Minal Vazirani set out to make Indian art more accessible. They succeeded

Source Vogue India by Muskan Mumtaz
When Dinesh and Minal Vazirani co-founded Saffronart in 2000, they weren’t just building a digital auction platform, they were tapping into a quiet but decisive cultural shift. At a moment when Indian art remained under-recognised on the global stage, they envisioned a future shaped not by external endorsement but by internal conviction. With backgrounds in consulting and engineering, the couple represented a new kind of tastemaker—one fluent in both global systems and local histories. They met at a Thanksgiving dinner in San Francisco, a chance encounter that would eventually spark a romance as well as a shared vision for the future of Indian art. “People thought we were crazy,” Minal recalls. “Our own families thought we were a little bit, you know, silly to do this.”
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9 artists break auction records at Sotheby’s South Asian sale.

Source Artsy by Maxwell Rabb
“Breaking nine world records for multiple artists from across South Asia, the auction once again showcased the strength and depth of this category,” said Manjari Sihare Sutin, Sotheby’s specialist and co-worldwide head of modern and contemporary South Asian art. “Sotheby's is proud to be building and expanding the conversation beyond what the world considers blue-chip modern Indian art.” The headline sale was Indian artist Jagdish Swaminathan’s triptych Homage to Solzhenitsyn (1973), which sold for $4.68 million, far exceeding its estimate of $1 million–$2 million. The artist’s previous auction record was set in December 2024 at Bonhams for Untitled (1991), which sold for $987,600.
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The cycle of life in Manu Parekh's 'Flower Sutra' at Nature Morte

Source Stir World by Manu Sharma
Parekh has been creating art since the 1970s and has engaged with religious themes across his career. His 2017 works such as The Last Supper and Image of Goddess—which references the Hindu goddess Durga—carry an overt religiosity. Meanwhile, his famous Banaras series, which began in the 1980s, captures the vibrancy of the holy city, mixing depictions of its temple architecture with Hindu symbolism, such as the delicate eyes associated with the divine figure Vishnu (who is known by some as Kamalnayan or ‘lotus-eyes’), and the Tripundra—a forehead marking with three horizontal lines—symbolising the deity Shiva’s command over wisdom, willpower and action. Many of the works at Nature Morte continue his fascination with the divine, though here he expresses this through his depictions of flowers. The gallery’s press release quotes the artist, stating, "Where there is faith, there will be the presence of flowers. Life, birth, marriage and death: flowers will be there. I have visited the Vatican, Ajmer, Nizamuddin Auliya's dargah, gurudwaras and Banaras. There were only two things common to all these places: faith and flowers."
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At 87, Arpita Singh Is Getting Her First Solo Show Outside of India.

Source Culture D by Giuliana Brida
Born in what is now the state of West Bengal in 1937, Singh didn’t foresee a life in the arts until her school principal nudged her along. “I didn’t know there was … a field called ‘art,’” she told Obrist. It wasn’t until her first year of college at Delhi Polytechnic that she visited an art museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art. Since emerging in the arts scene in the late 1960s, Singh has built a body of work that melds abstraction with traditional Indian court painting. The latter has a long history of blending the mythological and the quotidian, an enduring aspect of Singh’s work. “Remembering” spans large-scale oil paintings, intricate watercolors, and ink drawings. Her freedom of thought permeates the expansive show, in which recurring motifs—planes, fruits, and fragmented figures—evoke what Nietzsche described as the “eternal return,” a cyclical rhythm that feels at once personal and generationally universal. “I believe, then I doubt. I believe, and I doubt again,” Singh has said. “That’s the whole process of my work.”
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Crafts & Conversations: Swadesh celebrates accomplished women artisans

Source The New Indian Express by Nitika Krishna
The energies in the room were indescribably powerful — we listened intently as they told us about their lives and the crafts they were so passionate about. On International Women’s Day, six accomplished women artisans graced the dais at the Swadesh store in Jubilee Hills for 'Crafts & Conversations - Celebrating the Women Champions of Craft and Creative Traditions'. Moderated by Tanya Chaitanya, CEO and editor-in-chief, Her Circle (Digital & Diversity, Reliance), the conversation was heartwarmingly insightful. Sunetra Lahiri, a national award recipient for design innovation in aari and zardosi, spoke about how these embroidery forms are integral to the industry. The designer from West Bengal said her inspirations were Maa Durga and Maa Kali. "I am also an environmentalist; one of my works is 'Chlorophyll'. The idea is simple: We abuse this planet. But to take revenge, it doesn't have to do much," she noted. Claps reverberated as she underscored our duty to the planet.
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11 new art shows in India we’re excited about this March

Source Vogue India by Huzan Tata
French photojournalist Marc Riboud was one of the most celebrated lensmen of the 20th century, having clicked several historical and political events of his era. This retrospective exhibition presents Riboud’s powerful images of the refugee crisis that unfolded after the Bangladeshi Liberation War in and around Calcutta in 1971. Featuring over 43 hard-hitting photographs ranging from the Battle of Jamalpur to the fall of Dhaka, the aftermath of the War and Kolkata as a centre of refuge, the showcase gives viewers a humanitarian, intimate glimpse of a time of great upheaval, while also presenting images emanating hope and resilience—a true testament to Riboud’s mastery with his camera.
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Mumbai on my mind: six Indian star creatives on the city they love

Source Art Basel by Deepthi Sasidharan
In the 16th century, intrepid Portuguese cartographers marked seven islands on the western coast of India as the Ilhas de Bom Baim. In 1668, traders of the East India Company started leasing these islands from King Charles I of England and called the territory Bombay. A series of frenetic land reclamation projects ensued under British colonial rule, and the fishing islands slowly coalesced into a city. Meanwhile, booming mercantile wealth drew thousands of diverse people to this new port to build their lives. A coastal metropolis was born: Mumbai.
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‘The Way Home’: Subodh Gupta’s homecoming at Bihar Museum

Source The Telegraph by Ina Puri
The artist has delighted visitors from his beloved state. They are astounded by the kinetic sculptures he has brought to the museum, his architectural installations including his famous Ambassador car and his shiny Bullet motorbikes (so commonly seen on Patna streets and alleys) that even have milk pails slung as if the doodhwala is about to set off on his morning rounds to make deliveries. So strongly do the works resonate with the milieu that the thali containing ‘dough’ neatly covered with a red-and-white checked ‘cloth’ created from fibre glass becomes an object of great curiosity with visitors. They try to touch the dough to see if it is really the atta they make rotis with, causing consternation and amusement with the security guard.
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When art gets intimate

Source The New Indian Express by Jitha Karthikeyan
By the 1970s, the Women’s Liberation Movement led to a sexual revolution where the male gaze in art was challenged and women artists altered the narrative of erotic art by using their own nude bodies to express desire. In contemporary times too, artists do not shy away from eroticism. Indian artist T Venkanna’s graphic depictions of sexuality and eroticism have many takers. Art has always been a means to express the varied emotions that make up human existence and lustfulness has always been a defining one. Moral watchdogs may find it worthy of boycotts and bans, but it is worthwhile to remember that art history proves that vulgarity lies in the mind of the beholder.
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Inside India’s contemporary art scene

Source Wallpaper by Aashta D
To perceive depth, a shadow must be cast. To cast a shadow, light must be obstructed. And to obstruct light, an object must resist – holding onto opacity, refusing to dissolve under a glare. The white cube, designed to absorb as little resistance as possible, perpetuates a lie: a deceptive tabula rasa. Its sterile walls strip art of context, pretending neutrality while enforcing erasure. This was apparent at the recent India Art Fair 2025 at the NSIC grounds in New Delhi, which offered an array of these white cubes, where 120 exhibitors transformed their enclosed grids into storefronts-disguised-as-galleries.
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