Art Shows in London Chase Wealthy Indian Collectors
South Asian art is on a fresh surge in London with exhibitions and events that build on a boom in sales of Indian modern art. This is being partly fuelled by young high-earning collectors entering the market at a time when India’s financial confidence and markets are strong.
“Sans titre”, Casein (milk protein) paint on canvas 83in x 83in painted in 2001 by Paris-based Indian artist Viswanadhan, mixing, says the catalogue, Indian spiritual traditions and Western abstraction.
A major selling exhibition of works from across South Asia, Crossing Borders, opened last week at Phillips, a leading UK auction house that is reacting to the market’s potential by focussing on modern Indian art for the first time.
Partnered with the Grosvenor Gallery, a London-based specialist, there are 150 works by 64 artists priced at £5,000 to £1.5m on show till the end of July. The opening was timed to coincide with last week’s Lords test match (where England narrowly beat India) and the Wimbledon tennis tournament, both of which attract wealthy Indians to London.
There has also been a splash at the Mall Galleries near Buckingham Palace of some 500 Pichwai paintings on cloth, board and paper produced by local artists in Rajasthan and priced between £95 and £25,000.
This was London’s first major exhibition of the traditional Pichwai art form and was organised by Delhi-based Pooja Singhal, who has been developing a market for some ten years. She says that about 300 works, including the most expensive, were sold in five days, specially attracting Indian buyers among a reported total of some 2,500 visitors.
M.F.Husain’s Untitled (Village Scenes), 30in x 90in oil on canvas (1958), has the highest price in the show. It is similar in style to his £13.75m record priced work, comprising various smaller paintings collected on one big roll of canvas and then cut out for the finished work
Furthering the India focus, Isha Ambani Piramal, daughter of Mukesh Ambani, the country’s richest businessman, became the first Indian to lead the host committee for the Serpentine galleries’ glamourous summer party last month. The annual Serpentine Pavilion has been designed by Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum.
Meanwhile, on a different tack, a painting by Delhi-based artist Mukesh Sharma has been picked by Salman Rushdie for the cover of a new French edition of his 2005 novel Shalimar le clown.
Sharma says Rushdie spotted the 2018 acrylic on canvas on social media. Called Revitalising Memories, it was inspired by the Panchatantra (old animal fables) and folk art (declaration of interest – I own a Mukesh Sharma painting).
Crossing Borders
Spread across two floors at Phillips in Berkley Square, Crossing Borders has allowed the Grosvenor, which has a relatively small gallery near Pall Mall, to dramatically expand its artists’ annual summer exhibition.
It also marks the growing trend for galleries and auction houses to co-operate – Grosvenor works with Saffronart, the market leader for Indian art auctions, on the Art Mumbai annual (November) show.
Phillips does not plan to start auctions of South Asian art but will be including more works from the region in its auctions, says director Yassaman Ali, the exhibition’s curator with Grosvenor’s Conor Macklin.
Rekha Rodwittiya’s 2025 “Home is wherever you are” 55in x 77in painted water colour over digital print of autobiographic imagery.
Indian artists dominate including Bhupen Khakhar, Nilima Sheikh, Anish Kapoor, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza and Ram Kumar, plus M.F. Husain who has the highest price work at £1.5m, having set an unexpected record for modern Indian art of $13.75m at a Christie’s sale in New York four months ago.
Other significant but somewhat lesser known names include Keralan artist Viswanathan (top image above), who had a recent retrospective with 40 works at Sharjah Biennial 16 spanning five decades, and Rekha Rodwittiya whose works (image above) have been described as “strong, politically vigilant feminist”.
A group of Krishen Khanna’s bronze “Bandwalla“
Surprisingly Krishen Khanna, the only surviving major artist from the Raza, Souza and Husain mid-20th century Progressives Group, who has just celebrated his 100th birthday, does not have a painting on show, though his famous bandsmen do appear as a group of bronze statues.
The exhibition is a boost for Sri Lankan artists, five of whom have works led by Senaka Senanayake (below) and George Key. Senanayake’s son, Suren, told me that there was a revival of interest both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. “When I was growing up, people didn’t really talk about art,” he said. “Sri Lankan art was hanging onto the coat tails of India, but now it’s seen as an asset”.
There are 13 artists of Pakistani origin, two still living in Pakistan – Quddus Mirza and Anwar Syed. The others include Huma Bhabha, a Pakistani American sculptor living in the US whose works are also on show till next month at London’s Barbican gallery, and Rasheed Araeen, who lives in London and had a display of his brightly coloured lattice-construction cubes at the Tate Modern two years ago.
Senaka Senanayake’s Untitled (Wandering Elephants) Painted 2025 – oil on canvas 60in x 96in
Among other Pakistani artists, there is Abdur Rahman Chughtai, famous for his small finely tuned drawings and paintings that adapt Mughal miniature style with modernism, and Syed Sadequain, who mixed calligraphy and figurative works.
Pichwais, the Mountbattens and beyond
The profile of Pichwai art was raised in the UK 80 years ago by David Hicks, a prominent interior decorator who was married to Pamela Mountbatten, daughter of Lord Mountbatten, Britain’s last Viceroy. Hicks included Pichwais in arts and crafts he brought back for London’s high society.
Originally, the hand-painted tapestries hung as backdrops in shrines behind the statues of Lord Krishna. From that, they have developed for use in various Hindu rituals and festivals depicting sacred cows and other images, but in recent years the works have been little noticed outside India. They are however now beginning at attract attention along with other regional and traditional works, such as Gond tribal art from Madhya Pradesh, as collectors begin to broaden their focus from the modern artists on show at Phillips.
A traditional rendering by Pooja Singhal’s ATB of devotees at Dwarkadheesh Manorath, Kankroli Haveli, in Rajasthan
Pooja Singhal, who comes from the third generation of a business family that runs a large agrochemicals group (PI Industries), achieved a pr coup for her Pichwai show at the Mall Galleries. Coinciding with the launch, the Financial Times ran a full-page illustrated profile on her Delhi home titled Cultural patron Pooja Singhal: ‘I want to make Pichwai a household name’ in its House & Home section on July 5 (July 3 online). Sponsors of evening events included Conde Nast and India’s Rajasthan-based RAAS hotel group.
Singhal began to develop a business interest in the art form around 2016 and now runs Prichvai Tradition and Beyond which has had exhibitions in various Indian cities including a big presence at the annual India Art Fair in New Delhi.
A simple stone colour on cloth ATB composition 6in x 6in priced at £95.
She was brought up near the Rajasthan city of Udaipur and says she remembers visiting the temple town of Nathdwara, about 40 kms away, where traditional Pichwai textile paintings began 400 years ago as a devotional art form.
Somewhat controversially, Singhal does not have artists’ names on the paintings, nor on authentication certificates. Some sellers however do name their leading artists, for example Artisera, a Bangalore-based art centre,. and the providers of the best in the Ambani collection.
“We work as a collective and no one artist does the work,” she says, explaining that there is no central atelier for what she calls Atelier Tradition and Beyond (ATB), and that the artists are in various locations in and around Jaipur and Udaipur. “Many modern interpretations are conceived by me, or put on paper by a craftsman, and three or four artists complete the composition”. She says that there will be another Pichwai showing at Sotheby’s during London’s Asian Art Week in November.
The biggest event later this year will be a major Royal Academy exhibition at the end of October of works by Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015) and other artists who worked with her. Titled A Story of South Asian Art – Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle, it will be followed by a full Mukherjee retrospective in 2026 at the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield, Yorkshire.
As Salima Hashmi, a veteran Pakistani artist and professor based in Lahore, told me in April when she curated a (not for sale) South Asian exhibition at SOAS, “We come back to the old colonial capital to talk to one another”.
This article went live on July nineteenth, two thousand twenty five, at fifty-eight minutes past six in the evening.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
