New Delhi’s Art Market: A Turn, or Return, to Opulence?

New Delhi’s art scene has shifted locality almost as much as I have in my many years in the city. Delhi natives, ‘Dilliwalas’, are notoriously attuned to fluctuations in the prestige and property prices of different parts of the city. An ongoing real-estate boom (prices have risen by an average of 81 percent over the last five years) that has been transforming existing neighbourhoods of the inner city and fuelling the redevelopment of vast swathes of its periphery is often credited as the engine of the similarly thriving art market. Defence Colony, a well-heeled, but not (yet) obnoxiously wealthy, residential neighbourhood, where 1960s two-storey bungalows are giving way to modern four-storey apartment blocks, is the new art hotspot. Several galleries have set up shop here in recent months. Some have relocated from the less regulated and more bohemian ‘urban villages’ (literally former villages that have been urbanised), like Lado Sarai, which had its own moment a decade ago. It’s a shift that signals a turn, or return, to opulence.

Yet ‘Def Col’ itself was once on the fringe of what old-school Delhi snobs like myself considered the city proper. When I was growing up, the arts in Delhi had a very specific hub, known as Mandi House, after a 1930s colonial pile, originally intended as the Delhi outpost of a Himalayan ‘princely state’, but acquired by the government and later demolished to make room for the new headquarters of the national broadcaster, Doordarshan. Surrounding it was a cluster of performing arts and cultural institutions, including the National School of Drama (in Bahawalpur House, another former princely home, occupied from 1969 to 1974 by the US embassy’s cultural centre) and Rabindra Bhawan (1961), an arts complex designed by the notable government architect Habib Rahman, a former student of Walter Gropius and a favourite of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. There were several theatres and institutions set up by the Shriram Family, a famous clan of textile magnates and aesthetes. Their Shriram Centre auditorium (1972) was a looming accumulation of raw concrete solids by the Le Corbusier-struck brutalist Shiv Nath Prasad, and in its shadow was the little miracle of Triveni Kala Sangam (‘Confluence of Arts’), an arts centre with exhibition halls and an outdoor theatre, set up on land granted on a Nehruvian whim. This lovely building, inaugurated in 1963, was designed by the American émigré Joseph Stein, whose very midcentury-modern style is often designated as ‘international’, although his best buildings, like Triveni, are intimately local, blending their spare lines with Indic jaalis (screens) and walls of a dressed quartzite, textures that have marked Delhi’s architecture for centuries

In the 1970s, the leading artists of the Mandi House-era, almost famous but not yet rich, favoured one-room rooftop flats known as barsatis (‘monsoon rooms’), in neighbourhoods like Jangpura and Nizamuddin. It was a time when M.F. Husain, V.S. Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar and the sculptor Amar Nath Sahgal (artists associated with the foundational modernist collectives, the  Progressives, who started out in Bombay, and Delhi’s homegrown Silpi Chakra) all lived in walking distance of each other. 

The Hurun India Art List of December 2025 tells us that four out of the ten highest-grossing Indian artists still live in Delhi, but now it’s the galleries that are gathering collegially. The artists are certainly grossing a lot more, but no longer in barsatis – which are in any case being redeveloped out of existence. Speaking to a younger cohort of artists who began their careers in Delhi during the 2000s, I encounter a flinty cynicism about the city’s artworld today. “The old socialist veneer has evaporated,” says Aditya Pande (forty-nine) a visual artist and dyed-in-the-wool Dilliwala. “I don’t think there is anything like an art community, it’s a lie,” says Nityan Unnikrishnan (also forty-nine), a painter friend who has forsaken the city. “A good gallery is all an artist can have. What good is community?” Inevitably I hear a more polished positivity from the gallerists themselves. “I think that any established Indian gallery that has the possibility of expanding its presence to Delhi should consider doing so,” says Ranjana Steinruecke. A veteran gallerist in Mumbai, she opened Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Delhi in November 2024, and is proud to have played a role in bringing the ‘gallery-hopping’ scene to Def Col.

Another signal of the upward or gentrifying trend in Delhi’s arts venues is the emergence of two of the grander princely homes, Bikaner House and Travancore House (both by the Edwin Lutyens associate C.G. Blomfield), as popular upscale exhibition venues. These properties (on opposite sides of the ceremonial mall first known as Kingsway, then Rajpath and now Kartavya Path) had long been in the hands of their respective state governments (Rajasthan and Kerala), but emerged from decades of shabby bureaucratic desuetude (Bikaner in 2015 and Travancore House in 2023) as glittering, and expensive, venues for prestige shows. Major Delhi galleries such as DAG and Dhoomimal have held recent exhibitions at Bikaner House, while the trendy motorcycle marque Royal Enfield has staged iterations of its popular Himalayan-themed festival of arts and culture in both ‘houses’.

India Art Fair 2026. Courtesy India Art Fair

Even more emblematic of artistic fortunes in the capital is the India Art Fair, now held on the NSIC Exhibition Grounds on the southern edge of the city every February. Originally the Delhi Art Fair, it was first staged in 2008 on the old trade-fair grounds of Pragati Maidan at the base of Rajpath. Despite the unpropitious timing, the fair drew investment from the MCH Group (Art Basel), which acquired a majority stake in 2016 – only to sell it to Angus Montgomery Arts three years later. Overcoming such disruptions, the event has emerged as a major force in, and bellwether of, the Indian artworld. It’s latest, the 17th edition, held in the face of Art Basel’s return as a regional competitor, with Art Basel Qatar taking place the very same week, apparently set new benchmarks, with over 130 participants (including a number of foreign galleries) and visitor numbers in the tens of thousands. While the total value of sales was not announced, media reports described them as ‘huge’, and the major Delhi Vadehra Art Gallery (a pioneer in Def Col) announced that it had sold more than 80 percent of its catalogue, which included works by such late-career masters as Atul Dodiya and Sudhir Patwardhan, on day one. Expectedly, many artists carp about the crass commercialism of the event, but according to the photographer and installation artist Sheba Chhachhi , “The most interesting thing about the art fair is that even though tickets are so highly priced, large numbers of people go – people who would never go to a gallery.”

Also interesting was the fact that among Vadehra’s buyers at the fair was the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), the city’s most famous contemporary art museum in waiting. Actually, the KNMA has been a prominent presence in the city for some time now, with two premises – one in a South Delhi mall and the other on the campus of the software empire that fuels Chairperson Kiran Nadar’s legendary appetite for art. Nadar’s ambitions were also evident when she acted as curatorial advisor for an exhibition of artworks celebrating the 100th episode of PM Modi’s radio show, ‘Mann ki baat’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi in April 2023. (Incidentally, the NGMA is housed in yet another Blomfield-designed princely palace, Jaipur House). Now, expectation is mounting for the inauguration next year of Kiran Nadar’s purpose-built new museum, near the Delhi airport. Touted as India’s largest private art-museum, the David Adjaye-designed campus will reportedly cover almost 93,000 square metres. There is no gainsaying the seriousness of Nadar’s intent, or the significance of her collection. Earlier this year she hired Manuel Rabaté from the Louvre Abu Dhabi as the new CEO and director of the KNMA. Yet Delhi already has two other museum projects that promise to match the upcoming KNMA in size and ambition. One is The Brij, an arts centre of similar scale (also around 93,000 square metres) and proximate location, funded by S.K. Munjal, a motorcycle and scooter billionaire and well-known arts philanthropist. His Serendipity arts festival in Goa attracts some 100,000 visitors annually. The Brij is also scheduled for inauguration next year.

The third mega-museum planned for the city – and also rumoured to be completed in 2027 – is the Indian government’s Yuge Yugeen Bharat National Museum, which is slated to occupy the colonial acropolis designed by Herbert Baker at the top of the national mall. These premises, which had been the seat of India’s government since the late days of the Raj, are being vacated by Narendra Modi’s government, which in an act of architectural nationalism will move to a nearby complex of office blocks designed by the Indian architect Bimal Patel. While the new government buildings retain vestiges of the colonial aesthetic (‘half-Bakered’, as one wit had it), the new national museum promises to be the ‘world’s largest in terms of built-up area’, at 148,645 square metres according to news reports.

These three upcoming behemoths also reflect the awkward, or at least tentative, dance between the government, corporates and the arts in the capital. “Luckily the state is not really interested in contemporary art, so you don’t have the kind of interference that exists in other cultural forms,” another prominent Delhi artist tells me, praying that “the climate of indifference” persists. He feels that cinema faces far greater scrutiny and political pressure at the moment, but fears that for artists like himself too, “the alliance between large, private institutions and the agenda of the regime does not augur well in the long term”. For the moment, that alliance seems sealed by joint participation in the Venice Biennale (the KNMA returns with a collateral show featuring Nalini Malani, but Serendipity, as well as the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre--funded by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani-- are partners for the Ministry of Culture’s India Pavilion, curated by Amin Jaffer, best known for his association with the Paris-based Al Thani Collection).

The Ministry of Culture has also signalled that Jaffer has been ‘supporting India’s vision of the world’s largest museum’, an apparent reference to the Yuge Yugeeen museum. While the contents of that museum remain the subject of speculation, one substantial recent acquisition seems destined for display there. These are the Piprahwa treasures, jewels and relics associated with the historical Buddha, which were slated for auction by Sotheby’s Hong Kong, for a reported US$12.9 million, last year before the Indian government intervened and arranged for their acquisition by one of the country’s largest corporate groups, Godrej Industries, in July 2025. Just four months earlier, the KNMA had acquired a 1954 painting by M.F. Husain at a Christies New York auction, for US$13.8m – a record sum for an Indian artwork at the time. The record was recently broken with the sale of a Hindu mythological painting by the late-nineteenth-century artist Raja Ravi Varma, for the equivalent of US$17.9m in April at a Saffronart auction in Mumbai. The painting was acquired by the pharma billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, and this one, unlike the Husain and the Piprahwa treasures, is Delhi’s loss: DAG had earlier displayed the popular painting in its gallery at the city’s historic Red Fort, between 2019 and 2021. Indeed rumour has it that the gallery’s CEO and MD, Ashish Anand may have been the owner (or part owner) of the painting. Indeed, Anand’s collection is still identified as the ‘original source’ on Google Arts and Culture’s page on the painting. He was also one of the first to celebrate the ‘world record’ sale of the Ravi Varma, saying (in a lengthy press release) that it would give rise “to Indian art being viewed as a serious financial asset.” Whether bought or sold, such transactions are telling markers of the values, both financial and aesthetic, of the biggest players in New Delhi’s art scene today.