Widening the Canvas

THE GLOBAL BUZZ around Indian art is increasingly impossible to miss, par­ticularly following the success of India’s official pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026. Recent exhibitions like Sediments of Becoming at Saint Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art’s The Meeting Ground in London, combined with the grand opening of the MF Husain Museum (Lawh Wa Qalam) in Doha last year have further hyped the ‘India moment’. Indian galleries and artists routinely make waves at leading fairs like Art Basel, The Armory Show and Frieze. Against this backdrop, a quieter trend is gaining traction: the rise of diaspora-led galleries and collectives bridging the gap between India’s creative heritage and global audiences.

Rajiv Menon, a Los Angeles-based gal­lerist who opened his eponymous space in 2023, has emerged as a poster boy of this movement. From its beginnings as a pop-up to becoming one of the most visible galleries putting South Asian art on the American cultural radar, Rajiv Menon Contemporary’s success has been as surprising as it has been swift. The 38-year-old Menon, who was born in Texas to immigrant parents with roots in Kerala, admits that the gallery emerged from his desire to bring together the two distinct cultures under the banner of the American Dream.

Menon recalls the years he spent observing how South Asian actors came to prominence in Hollywood while K-Pop’s cultural takeover of the US became the toast of the town. He was excited about these developments in American contemporary culture but also felt frus­trated by the lack of recognition for South Asian art and culture. “South Asians were leading in the fields of music, cinema and fashion but they were, by and large, absent from the visual arts,” says Menon. “South Asian artists were always treated as individual anomalies in the American gallery system. You’d see a show of Indian art here, a show there. What I wanted to create was more like a hub that would capture the soul of the diaspora.” In his telling, South Asian expats had not been activated as an art audience before.

At least, New York has had galleries that championed a rich tapestry of Indian art (Sundaram Tagore, Talwar, Aicon and Kapoor Galleries). “But there was a groundswell of cultural possibilities on the West Coast, where I lived and yet, there was nothing here to drive that mo­mentum,” laments Menon. Starting out as a collector, he imagined a platform fo­cused on hybrid storytelling that sought to juxtapose South Asian contemporary voices alongside the broader context of the cultural trends blowing through the globe today. “South Asian art is as diverse as the region it hails from, and doing anything around it requires deep contex­tualisation and cultural familiarity,” says the gallerist, whose approach to curation is kaleidoscopic, drawing on the dynamic energy and cultural resonances of the myriad mediums, styles and practices of the young South Asian zeitgeist.

A year and a half since its formation, Rajiv Menon Contemporary has exhib­ited artists like Anoushka Mirchandani, Viraj Khanna, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Gurjeet Singh, Purvai Rai and Rajni Perera. Having cultivated a new network of American collectors and secured prestigious institutional placements for his artists, Menon’s growth story helps explain the shift underway in the art world. Power dynamics are changing. It’s moving away from the clutches of bigger galleries into the hands of passionate self-starters and indie outfits.

SUNDARAM TAGORE HAD a front-row seat to the ascent of Indian art in the US. A great-grand­nephew of Rabindranath Tagore and son of the artist Subho Tagore (one of the founders of the Calcutta Group), Tagore celebrated his gallery’s 25th anniversary with a landmark exhibition in New York City last year. Today, Sundaram Tagore Gallery spans three continents—having outposts in Singapore and most recently, in London. Asked if he has accomplished his original mission of bringing the West a little closer to the East, the India-born gallerist and dealer replies: “It remains a work in progress rather than a destina­tion.” He’s quick to point out that when he started the gallery in 2000, his aim was not only to showcase Indian diasporic art­ists but to assemble talents from different cultures whose work represented shared ideas and concerns. For years, he saw how Asian artists were bracketed into the “Asian art” category while Western artists remained cocooned in their own canon. Tagore wanted to dismantle these hier­archies to reveal “a more interconnected reality”. He agrees that the art world is far more global and secular today, explain­ing, “Many institutions now embrace cross-cultural narratives that were once considered unconventional.”

When Tagore started his career in the 1980s, artists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, were often treated as peripheral to the dominant narrative of modern and contemporary art. “Today, museums, biennials, art fairs, and private collections have a much broader international outlook. Curators are expanding the art historical nar­rative to recognise multiple centres of innovation, and collectors are increas­ingly interested in artists from across the globe,” says Tagore, who has worked with many Indian-origin artists, from masters like Sohan Qadri and SH Raza to emerg­ing names like Neha Vedpathak and Trishla Jain. At the same time, he believes misconceptions about Indian art persist in the Western world. “There is still an expectation in some quarters that Indian artists should somehow ‘look Indian’ by referencing mythology, spirituality, textiles or other traditional motifs,” he says, adding, “Those can be important influences, but they are not the measure of authenticity.”

‘India exotic’ is partially what works in the European market, admits Hervé Perdriolle, one half of Modesti Perdriolle Gallery in Brussels, along with Maximil­iano Modesti. The gallery was envisioned to subvert familiar narratives surround­ing Indian art. Ironically, it’s Indian indigenous art that European buyers are snapping up right now—perhaps, it reminds them of the primitive naiveté of Henri Rousseau or even Pablo Picasso’s heady African period. Perdriolle has hosted exhibitions of Warli artists, Jivya Soma Mashe and Mayur and Tushar Vayeda. They also regularly show T Venkanna whose erotically charged paintings seem to have captured the imagination of younger (and certainly, edgier) collectors. Perdriolle attributes the momentum to Europe’s renewed fascina­tion with “otherness”. According to him, Europeans are opting for an alternative to the disappearance of artistic movements such as the historical Western avant-gardes. “Tribal art’s animistic culture and the interdependence of man with nature, strongly resonate with our contempo­rary world and its ecological concerns,” explains Perdriolle, who has just curated a show titled INDIA at the Palácio Duques de Cadaval in Portugal (on view until October 25).

MAXIMILIANO MODESTI, who splits his time between France and India, calls the European market for Indian art “nascent, but diversifying”. He insists his gallery is a smaller player, but still committed to their original vision—to put money where their mouth is and support Indian artists they have always loved. He says that to grow “we need more global institutions and private hands to step in, beyond the diaspora”.

The Thrissur-born artist Abul Hisham, based in Amsterdam since 2021, speaks from experience when he remarks that European audiences con­nect with Indian art because it feels bold, raw and real. “People here appreciate the fact that contemporary Indian art is deeply rooted in layered cultures, histo­ries and aesthetics while addressing po­litical, social, and spiritual questions. It offers a perspective that is both local and universally relevant,” says Hisham, who has exhibited at major museums and institutions across Europe and America since moving to Amsterdam, where he participated in the Rijksakademie’s international residency programme.

One hears a similar optimism among the Paris-based collective TAK Contem­porary. In the five years that Damini Kulkarni, one of the three Indian-origin founders of TAK, has spent in Paris, she thinks a momentum is finally gathering around Indian art. “If you look at blue-chip galleries, like Galerie Nathalie Oba­dia, Galleria Continua or Perrotin, there’s at least one Indian artist on their roster. This is a huge positive,” says Kulkarni. Given Paris’ rich history with Indian art (Amrita Sher-Gil, Sakti Burman, Akbar Padamsee and SH Raza discovered the ‘City of Love’ long before Bollywood did), she finds it surprising that “nothing `consolidated” existed there for the sub­continent. Many older artists, including Viswanadhan, Akkitham Narayanan and Anju Chaudhuri, still live and work in Paris, their practices shaped as much by their European encounters as by the cultural memories they carried from India. Yet, save for designer Mohanjeet Grewal’s gallery, “India was happening in only bubbles in Parisian art circles,” notes Kulkarni, adding that this is the niche that TAK stepped up to fill.

London too remains a mecca for art lovers. The city’s galleries and museums have taken pride in hosting Indian shows while a vibrant community of diasporic artists have made it their home, from Sunil Gupta to younger names like Raghav Babbar and Sayan Chanda.

Hisham says he enjoys being part of the global Indian diaspora because it allows him to grow artistically as well as “build greater awareness of the richness and diversity of Indian art.” Does he miss home? “Of course,” he responds, before quickly adding, “But living away from Kerala feels a little like watching it from a distance and seeing it in a different light. Sometimes you need to step away to gain clarity and truly look within. I think I am on that journey now.”