How record auctions are fuelling India's art boom

Source BBC News by Anahita Sachdev
Dinesh Vazirani, a founder of Saffronart, believes this is a "point of massive inflection". Marking its 25th anniversary, Saffronart's recent auction saw a packed room, spirited bidding, and a rare "white glove" result - every lot sold, with some attendees even "squabbling" over artworks, according to an attendee. "When we started in 2000, people said we were crazy. Who's going to buy art online?" Mr Vazirani said. "Seeing the art market with so much strength almost validated that what we started as maybe foolish young people has become a very mature industry." The boom in Indian art - which dominates South Asia's market - comes even as global art sales slump. The 2024 Art Basel and UBS report shows a 12% drop worldwide, the second yearly decline. Mr Vazirani predicts the auction market could double last year's earnings, driven by rising wealth in India and among the diaspora. Millionaire households have nearly doubled in four years. As the rich pour money into their luxurious lifestyle, art has become both a status symbol and an investment. For these groups, art is a generational asset that can also be enjoyed, Mr Vazirani argues. "They understand that you can't buy it and trade in it. But if you hold it for long periods of time, the appreciation is quite dramatic." Recent tax cuts slashing goods and services tax (GST) on art from 12% to 5% have also helped boost the market.
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Kochi Muziris Biennale announces participating artists 2025 edition

Source Artsy by Maxwell Rabb
The Kochi Biennale Foundation has announced the full roster of artists set to participate in “For the Time Being,” the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. This year’s event will be curated by Indian artist Nikhil Chopra and HH Art Spaces. Opening on December 12, 2025, and running through March 31, 2026, the biennial will present 66 artists and collectives, including Marina Abramović and LaToya Ruby Frazier, from over 20 countries. Inaugurated in 2012, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is South Asia’s largest contemporary art event and the first biennial established in India. It spans multiple cultural sites across Kochi in the state of Kerala, including Aspinwall House, Pepper House, the Island Warehouse on Willingdon Island, 111 (KVJ Building), Durbar Hall, and Space, the former Indian Chamber of Commerce.
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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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