In India, the gallery landscape is broader, the network connecting artists, collectors, and institutions more interconnected, with a conversation that has grown more considered — less about arrival, more about consolidation.

Sotheby’s Institute alumnus Mohit Gupta shares why he sees India’s art scene as plural and globally engaged, increasingly focused on building depth through research, process, and long‑term stewardship.

“India’s expanding influence is also visible in the way international contemporary practice is engaging Indian visual traditions with greater specificity.”

The Creative Energy of India

India’s creative energy comes from an ability to move across timelines without friction. Traditional visual languages are not treated as sealed heritage. They remain living systems, constantly reinterpreted and reactivated.

At the same time, many artists are addressing the present with clarity and restraint, working through archives, ecology, urban change, language, migration, and personal histories without relying on spectacle.

One of the most meaningful shifts has been a renewed respect for process. There is growing attention to how work is made, to the ethics of labor, and to the intelligence of materials.

Collecting practices have matured alongside this. More collectors are spending time in studios, building relationships, and investing in knowledge, not only in acquisition. Taste is increasingly shaped by attention and duration.

The ecosystem has also become more multicentered. New Delhi remains a market anchor and gallery hub. Mumbai continues to lead institutional and philanthropic activity.

Kolkata sustains one of the country’s most rigorous contemporary conversations. Alongside these, Jaipur is emerging in a quieter but meaningful way. Long recognized for craft heritage and visual identity, it is now being read as a place where collecting culture, living traditions, and contemporary audiences meet naturally. Its growing relevance lies in that balance, accessible yet serious.

India’s expanding influence is also visible in the way international contemporary practice is engaging Indian visual traditions with greater specificity. Ai Weiwei’s first solo exhibition in India at Nature Morte included new works responding to historic Indian paintings, including Pichwais.

Gestures like this suggest that Indian art forms are increasingly being read as significant visual languages within global contemporary discourse, rather than as peripheral references.

Must See Spaces

India is best understood through a mix of platforms that reveal circulation, research, and sustained attention, rather than any single center.

India Art Fair

India’s most visible convening point for modern and contemporary South Asian art. It offers a clear reading of market activity, while also tracing curatorial direction, institutional participation, and the evolving language of collecting.

Kochi Muziris Biennale

The country’s most ambitious public-facing contemporary platform. Its strength lies in building a returning audience and embedding contemporary practice into the memory of a city, not just the tempo of an art season.

Mumbai Gallery Weekend

A strong example of what happens when a gallery community collaborates to expand public engagement. It encourages slower looking and creates a citywide viewing rhythm that feels genuinely shared.

Mukesh Art Gallery

A space I’m personally invested in, but one grounded in an institutional idea. Founded by my father 26 years ago and carried forward as a family-run practice with my elder brother and me, it spans six levels and holds close to 50,000 works. Today, as second-generation Creative Director, I see it as a living archive of Indian visual traditions in active dialogue with contemporary practice. It supports over 150 artists directly and sustains a much wider ecosystem indirectly through continuity of skill, production, and livelihood.

What its scale makes possible is not spectacle, but range without dilution. Visitors can move across schools, techniques, and material histories in one place, from connoisseurship to discovery, and back again. The ambition is simple and exacting: to make access feel generous while keeping standards uncompromising.

Images courtesy of Gourab Ganguli

Artists and Trends to Watch

India’s contemporary scene today is less about a single dominant movement and more about artists building sustained visual languages. Practices that hold technical rigor, cultural legibility, and a commitment to seriousness over quick effect.

Gopal Swami Khetanchi

Khetanchi represents a confident return to figuration rooted in social observation and Indian visual culture. His work carries painterly control and an instantly recognizable vocabulary. It shows how realism can continue to evolve without nostalgia or irony.

Taslim Jamal

Jamal’s work draws from lived experience and environment, using animals and everyday moments as quiet carriers of emotion and memory. Her practice reflects a wider turn toward inward narratives, where place and personal history create force without spectacle.

Toofan Rafai

A renewed seriousness around process and material knowledge is reshaping how we read earlier practices too. Rafai’s pioneering work with vegetable dyes extends painting into dye research and craft systems. In a moment attentive to ecology, labor, and material intelligence, his contribution feels newly contemporary.

Taken together, these practices point to a larger direction. Continuity over novelty. Material understanding over surface. Narrative clarity over excess.

India on the Global Stage

International engagement with India has become more informed and sustained. Collectors are following specific artists and programmes rather than approaching India as a single category. Institutions abroad are increasingly placing Indian artists within broader global narratives rather than confining them to regional frames.

Platforms such as India Art Fair create visibility, while Kochi creates depth and duration. Equally significant is the growing global fluency of Indian collectors. Through commissioning, lending, supporting publications, and enabling institutional conditions, they are creating room for ambitious, research‑intensive work to exist without compromise.

Mohit’s Top Picks in India

  • India Art Fair 2026, New Delhi, February 5–8, 2026
    If there is one moment that captures the ecosystem in high definition, it is this. The fair brings serious galleries, collectors, and programming into one concentrated week, with enough citywide momentum around it to reveal what the market is actually paying attention to. It is also one of the clearest places to see how collecting in India is evolving toward slower decisions, stronger provenance awareness, and long horizon thinking.
  • Manjit Bawa, The Storyteller, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, January 28, 2026
    For a viewing experience that rewards patience, this is the one I would send people to first. Bawa’s visual language is immediately recognizable, but what stays with you is its control, its quiet symbolism, and its refusal to perform. Vadehra frames exhibitions with clarity, and this presentation reads as a considered encounter rather than an event.
  • ART MUMBAI, Mahalaxmi Racecourse, Mumbai, November 12–15, 2026
    Later in the year, if you want a single recommendation that feels decisive, choose ART MUMBAI. It has the right compression of energy and seriousness, a weekend where galleries, artists, collectors, and curators share one tempo. Mumbai already carries institutional weight, but this fair gives the city a focused moment where attention is concentrated and standards rise naturally.
  • Cafe: Kala Ghoda Cafe, Fort precinct, Mumbai
    When you want to keep the conversation going after an opening, this is the kind of place that works. It is unfussy, central, and quietly woven into the Fort rhythm, where meetings happen without being staged and the city’s cultural life feels lived in rather than scheduled.

Mohit’s Take

My relationship with the Indian art community is both personal and professional. I grew up around art as a lived environment, works being made, framed, discussed, and exchanged as part of daily life. Undertaking a number of short courses at Sotheby’s Institute sharpened my understanding of how institutions shape meaning and how markets shape visibility, but it also reinforced something more fundamental, the importance of stewardship.

That belief underpins my involvement with Mukesh Art Gallery. The aim is to support artists sustainably, preserve technique, and build confidence in audiences. It is designed to welcome first-time viewers without simplifying the work, and to offer depth for serious collectors without closing the door to discovery.