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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Monsoons, mould … and a million visitors: welcome to Kerala’s ‘people’s biennale’

Source The Guardian by Geneva Abdul
“We live in a bit of a jaded world which is overstuffed with art, music, cinema, theatre,” said Chopra. “We are spoiled for choice to such an extent that I think that the world is really interested in ideas and voices from this side of the economic hemisphere.” Kochi, formerly known as Cochin, sits between the Indian Ocean and the Western Ghats. But the communist-led state is not just uniquely placed geographically. It has passed through the hands of the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, and remained a melting pot of cultures and religions: within walking distance of the show are the Santa Cruz basilica, Paradesi Synagogue and the Dharmanath Jain Temple. “Kerala has always been a place for critical thinking. It’s a very self-aware place to be,” said Chopra, who took part in the 2014 biennale. “People do see and find value in a cultural outing as opposed to say a joy ride or a picnic,” he said, before correcting himself. “This is a picnic among the art.”
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10 new art shows in India we’re excited about this February

Source Vogue India by Sana Krishna
February brings not roses so much as new art shows that you can incidentally turn into date-night activity. Mangesh Rajguru halts the eye mid-step, letting colour brush against humour and time; Shimul Saha reframes war as theatre, testing form, scale and perception through drawing, sculpture, fabric, video and cyanotype. At Chanakya School, cloth becomes a testimony of labour, lineage and transmission (photo Experimenter Kolkata); while Jodhaiya Bai Baiga carries forest ritual, labour and chant into contemporary paint. Read together, these exhibitions map a field preoccupied with how materials perform and how forms are shaped by stories and time. India Art Fair, the star attraction of the annual cultural calendar, celebrates it 17th edition with 135 exhibitors working across clay, cork, paper, pigment and more—mediums that act as carriers of history, labour and imagination. Here’s a lowdown on the other shows that you shouldn’t miss this month.
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Marina Abramović on India visit: ‘Western culture is exhausted; we need fresh points of view’

Source The Hindu by Gautami Reddy
In Waterfall (2003), a monumental installation now on view at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, their voices and faces are layered into a continuous cascade, creating a calming atmosphere for those who sit in its presence. Alongside it, the Marina Abramović Institute is presenting an archive of films, drawings and performances since its founding in 2007. The performance artist will also present The Past, Present, and Future of Performance Art, a lecture reflecting on her career and how performance has evolved as a form. In an email interview ahead of her visit, Abramović reflects on India as a spiritual teacher, and on why, in what she describes as a moment of cultural exhaustion, she believes art can still point towards a future.
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The 7 Most Striking Artworks at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025–2026

Source Artsy by Gautami Reddy
“I am an artist. I only know how to work in the studio, and this biennale is an extension of that studio,” said Nikhil Chopra at the opening of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s largest contemporary art exhibition and the first biennial founded in India. An internationally renowned performance artist and founder of HH Art Spaces, Chopra has shaped the curatorial vision of this edition. Titled “For the Time Being,” the biennale brings together 66 artists from 25 countries across 29 venues in Kochi, India, a historic port city on the country’s southwestern coast. Much like a performance, the program unfolds gradually, running across 110 days. Rather than presenting a fixed exhibition, many venues function as active sites for durational works, shifting installations, and slow processes of gathering and making. Responding to a world shaped by conflict, rapid technological change, deepening inequality, environmental crisis, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness, Chopra selected artworks that propose presence and friendship as practical responses to the moment. Many of the works invite visitors to slow down and engage with art through the body—by sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, listening, or simply conversing.
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The Sixth Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foregrounds Human Experience

Source Observer by Elisa Carollo
“The biennale wants to take stock of what it means to be present on this planet together. Even though we inherit collective histories and memories, and we speak of ourselves as a people stretched across time, landscapes and geographies, one fact remains: we are here now,” Chopra reflected. “We are contemporaries of one another in the present, and we share this moment. That sense of presence is one of the forces driving us.” Here, the human body is understood as the only filter, site of encounter and witness to temporality as we confront the present world. For this reason, presence—physical presence, specifically—sits at the core of the show and shaped the criteria for selecting artists. “Whenever we visited an artist’s studio, or when I looked back at artworks I’ve encountered around the world, we were asking: can we feel the artist’s presence? Not only through performance or liveness, though those are part of our programming, but in any medium—can you believe that the artist is truly here, in their work?” Chopra said. This approach led to the notion of “the neighboring body.” “We wanted to feel the sweat, blood and toil of the artist, whether in painting, sculpture or any other form, and we were looking for intelligence that emerges through making.” Ultimately, the biennale is about returning us to real encounters—with the work, with others and with the world... “The ghosts of the past are etched right into the walls of these warehouses—the very spaces the artists are showing in,” Chopra observed. “They’re not white, pristine cubes at all; they’re full of texture, memory, smells, history—distant voices still coming through.
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