This Year’s India Art Fair Proves Local Collectors Show No Sign of Slowing Down

For its 16th edition, the India Art Fair in New Delhi clamped down on the number of invites it extended for its ultra-VIP preview, from 11 am to 3 pm on Thursday. This attempt to avoid the overwhelming rush witnessed at last year’s edition was forgotten just minutes after the clock struck 3, the tent becoming overcrowded. The buzz all day seem optimistic, a sign of India’s maturation of a leading art market hub. The day’s clear blue sky, in a city that tends to be smoggy, seemed especially a good omen for commerce.

Long a flagbearer for the local market, the India Art Fair set its ambitions high at the end of 2024, with the unexpected announcement that it would expand to Mumbai. But a successful edition of recent rival Art Mumbai in November, and its commitment from major galleries for its 2025 edition, forced IAF to call off those plans. Now, back on its home turf, IAF had a point to prove. 

“Our plans are about building a stronger collector base in India … to grow the market,” Scott Gray, CEO of IAF’s parent company Angus Montgomery Arts, told ARTnews. Part of that strategy includes engaging in cities across India. While a Mumbai fair might be off the table for the time being, the company has eyes to announce a new fair in the southern city of Hyderabad once this edition wraps up. With ownership stakes in fairs in Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo, and Sydney, Gray added that this global network of fairs gives IAF an edge in its ability “to bring international clients to Delhi that way is quite promising.”

An International Draw

One reason the energy at this year’s IAF was so buoyant was the return of major blue-chip, international galleries like David Zwirner and Lisson Gallery. Lisson director Ellie Harrison-Read said the gallery decided to return after a 13-year hiatus because the Venice Biennale and major institutional exhibitions for gallery artists like Otobong Nkanga and Olga de Amaral were “a significant point of connection as the source of new conversations with our Indian contacts” over the past year. At Zwirner’s booth, several works sold on the first day, including paintings by Portia Zvavahera, Oscar Murillo and Sosa Joseph, as well as a sculpture by Huma Bhabha; many of these went to collectors from the region. (A date conflict with the opening of Sharjah Biennale was likely a reason for lower attendance of collectors from the Middle East.)

A long-time IAF participant Galleria Continua, which operates in seven cities around the world, had on offer works by Indian artists Subodh Gupta, Shilpa Gupta and Nikhil Chopra paired with a major orange plexiglass sculpture by Julio Le Parc, which sold for 340,000 euros to an Indian collector, according to cofounder Maurizio Rigillo.

During the VIP preview, Kiran Nadar, one of India’s top collectors and founder of an eponymous museum in New Delhi, was seen in both Zwirner and Lisson’s booths. She bought works from both galleries. But she also made sure to support the local scene buying heavily from Indian galleries.

New York–based Aicon Contemporary, which primarily shows artists from South Asia and its diaspora, was also a beneficiary of Nadar’s collecting appetite, with purchases including works by Alice Kettle, Avishek Sen, and L.N. Tallur. Projjal Dutta, a partner at the gallery, said Nadar has been a client since it first started exhibiting at IAF in 2019, adding that she “buys secularly across the board in terms of price points, from our well-established and mid-career artists [to] the emerging end of the market.”

Nadar, who plans to grow her private museum in the coming years, said this return of major galleries to India’s top fair is a sign that the market here is one of the fastest growing at the moment. “Indian art has evolved beyond miniatures,” Nadar told ARTnews in an interview, pointing to recent recognition for Indian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil who died at 28 in 1941 and was featured in the 2024 Venice Biennale. “Beyond the moderns, there is now an explosion of Indian contemporary art in America, and for example, I see institutions like MoMA in the US taking charge of this. … The trend has been strongly upwards in the last few years.”

A Shift from the Modern to the Contemporary

The Indian art market in terms of high-value transactions remains driven by the country’s modern masters. “To have access to the top collectors, it is necessary to also have a portfolio of modern masters,” Somak Mitra, founder of Kolkata’s Art Exposure gallery, told ARTnews. At the fair, the gallery’s booth focused on younger contemporary artists like Buddhadev Mukherjee, whose six works sold for $44,000 in total, with three going to Nadar, one to another Indian collector, and the final two to a US-based collector. But works by octogenarian artist Jogen Chowdhury were available for sale, just not on display.

DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery), the leading gallery for modern art, curated a large presentation of 40 such artists, including M.F. Husain, whose works were recently seized by an Indian court from an exhibition at the gallery. Despite this controversy, DAG’s Ashish Anand said it would continue to support the artist. “M. F. Husain is an important artist whose works hang in the National Gallery of Modern Art as well as the international airport in New Delhi, and he remains among the most admired, viewed, and collected of Indian modernists. [The] India Art Fair 2025 will no doubt attest once more to his popularity,” he said.

Asvita’s, a gallery from Chennai, had on view work by artists associated with the Madras Art Movement of the 1960s. Five works by on the movement’s early exponents, DP Roychowdhury, sold to a Mumbai-based collector for $69,000.

However, the prices for Indian modern art have risen so high that many younger collectors have begun to explore the work of emerging and mid-career artists who still do not have an international profile, the prices for which remain accessible. Delhi’s Vadehra Gallery sold about 90 percent of its booth on the first day, with prices ranging from $2,500 to $300,000 USD, including works by  Sudhir Patwardhan, Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta, and Vivan Sundaram.

“Younger Indian collectors are certainly more independent in their choices of artists, and more engaged with the works they buy,” Peter Nagy, founder of Delhi’s Nature Morte, told ARTnews. “It’s not so much everyone running after a few established names, like it was 20 years ago.” His booth was one of several, including Chemould Prescott Road and Experimenter, that had a presentation of around 15 artists from each gallery’s roster, an attempt to capture a greater share of a growing market in which collectors’ tastes are evolving.

These changes what collectors are buying as also impacted galleries who are based outside of India’s two main art hubs, Mumbai and New Delhi. Iram Gallery, based in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, sold works by Promiti Husain and Sangeeta Sandrasegar, as well as a large work by Dinar Sultana to an Indian collector for $24,000 USD, according to dealer Harssh Shah.

Last year, the India Art Fair introduced a design section as a way to differentiate itself. “That was a huge success last year, and appreciated by public audiences and collectors alike,” IAF director Jaya Asokan told ARTnews. “This year we build further with an expanded set of 11 studios, with focus on design studio practices which are inspired by the Indian craft tradition.”

Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which has locations in Europe and the US, returned to the fair after its debut last year. Among the pieces it brought was Maarten Baas’s Self Portrait Clock, which sold for $500,000 to a prominent Indian collection during the first day. As part of the section’s focus on traditional crafts, the gallery also had on view a mirror piece by Ashiesh Shah, inspired by the Kumbh Mela and his interest in jewelry; two works from an edition of eight also found buyers.

“For emerging or mid-career artists, buyers still have more leverage because the market remains in a phase of growth and exploration,” said Ameya Dias, an art adviser to some of India’s most prominent collectors. “Prices have been steadily going up for successful artists due to growing interest not just within India but from international museums as well.”

Another recent development is that many of these collectors are also looking to expand their holdings to include international art, likely a major reason that Zwirner and Lisson have returned to India. Their presence, she said, “is enabling easier access and acting as a catalyst.”