India Art Fair 2026

curatorial note

India is a land of layered histories, plural belief systems and an enduring cultural richness. Over centuries, sailors and soldiers, traders and merchants, conquerors and settlers, writers and, finally, artists encountered the land through stories and images that beckoned and beguiled, conflating the exotic with the real. Colonial artists and their acolytes sought to paint landscapes and portraits, while their local counterparts preferred narratives teeming with popular mythologies. India’s art practices, therefore, experienced and assimilated changes, gaining from each confrontation, nurturing a range of artistic styles, mediums and contexts.

The works brought together in India Past and Present emerge from this long history of encounter and exchange. The selection includes early Western and Indian artists such as Arthur William Devis and Sewak Ram whose works reflect differing modes of observations shaped by the colonial gaze and courtly traditions. They are followed by academically trained Indian artists including M V Dhurandhar and Radha Charan Bagchi whose practices signal the institutionalisation of art education and the assimilation of Western techniques with Indian subject matter. The earliest academically trained artists with a pedagogy in Western art later paved the way for the Indian modernists, among whom were some who then moved to foreign shores to live and paint.

As these encounters deepened, Indian artists moved beyond academic realism towards experimentation and an exploration of identity. The showcase traces this shift through the works of S H Raza, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Nirode Mazumdar, P T Reddy, Kanwal Krishna and Devayani Krishna, among others. Spanning abstraction, figuration and narrative modes, these artists developed distinct vocabularies within the broader framework of Indian modernism.

Based on the vibrant cycle of absorption and experimentation, this curated collection of some of DAG’s finest works speaks of the rich heritage and legacy of pre-modern and modern Indian art that survives into the present.