India’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Artwork is taking its assortment to Christie’s London this summer season, although don’t anticipate any of its artworks to be on the market.
From July 16 to August 21, the New Delhi establishment will stage “The Assembly Floor,” a non-selling survey of works from its 16,000-work assortment on the public sale home. The present will place Indian modernists like M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, Okay.G. Subramanyan, and F.N. Souza, alongside up to date South Asian artists, practitioners of Indigenous artwork traditions, and artists from the diaspora. Admission to the exhibition is free.
The Christie’s—Kiran Nadar linkup arrives amid an inflection level for the Indian and South Asian artwork markets. South Asian fashionable and up to date gross sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s have grown in dimension and worth within the final 5 years, with such gross sales changing into an rising focus of Asia New New York, as Karen Ho reported for ARTnews in 2024. Public sale data have been damaged repeatedly not too long ago: In March 2025, Christie’s New York bought M.F. Husain’s monumental Untitled (Gram Yatra) (1954) for $13.8 million—a brand new public sale document for contemporary Indian artwork, shattering a pre-sale estimate of $2.5–$3.5 million. Then, final month, Saffronart in Delhi broke that document, with the sale of Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda and Krishna (ca. Nineties) for $17.9 million.
The Indian collector base has additionally grow to be extra sturdy in recent times, led by collectors like Nita Ambani, founding father of Reliance Basis, the nonprofit arm of India’s largest personal firm, Reliance Industries, and Kiran Nadar, the founder and namesake of her eponymous museum and the spouse of Shiv Nadar, founder of knowledge know-how multinational HCL Applied sciences, as Shreejaya Nair reported for ARTnews‘s annual Prime 200 Collectors situation, additionally in 2024.
Kulpreet Singh, Indelible Black Marks (element), 2022-24.
Courtesy Kulpreet Singh and Kiran Nadar Museum of Artwork
In the meantime, the customer of the record-breaking Husain? Nadar herself, who has continued to develop the museum into some of the necessary nodes within the South Asian artwork ecosystem. Earlier this month, KNMA opened “Of Girls Born,” a collateral occasion on the 2026 Venice Biennale by Nalini Malani. The immersive set up, which affords a feminist retelling of the Greek delusion of Orestes, shows over 30,000 hand-drawn iPad animations throughout 9 channels in Venice’s Magazzini del Sale. In the course of the earlier Biennale, KNMA staged an exhibition of labor by Husain.
“Worldwide engagement is a pillar of our imaginative and prescient, opening up new frameworks for dialogue and scholarship,” Nadar mentioned in an announcement in regards to the London exhibition.
KNMA is within the midst of a big growth. The museum, which opened in 2010 as India’s first personal establishment devoted to fashionable and up to date artwork from the subcontinent, is presently constructing a brand new dwelling close to Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Worldwide Airport, a sprawling complicated projected to exceed a million sq. ft, with a number of exhibition areas, a performing arts middle, a library and archive middle, an schooling middle, and several other eating places.
Set up view of Nalini Malani’s “Of Girls Born,” 2026.
Christie’s shouldn’t be the one public sale home courting the South Asian market with exhibitions. In 2023, Sotheby’s London staged a non-selling exhibition of Raza’s work to concide with the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of the artist in Paris. “Regardless of the place somebody entered the constructing, they might not miss the Raza exhibition,” Manjari Sihare-Sutin, vice chairman and worldwide co-head Sotheby’s fashionable and up to date South Asian artwork division, advised ARTnews in 2024.
Christie’s is touting the historic nature of the exhibition, with Damian Vesey, Christie’s worldwide specialist for South Asian fashionable and up to date artwork, saying in an announcement that it’s “the primary time Christie’s London has devoted its summer season exhibition to South Asia, in addition to to a single establishment.”
