The conclusion of the 15th edition of the India Art Fair (IAF) in New Delhi on February 4 saw an increased success compared to last year’s iteration, with the fair reporting a 30 percent uptick in visitors on the VIP day. Many galleries reported buzzing sales and strong pricing, with interest from both Indian private collectors and institutions from across South Asia.
While the global art market has recently faced headwinds, the Indian art market has seemingly only strengthened post-pandemic, buoyed by the country’s robust economic growth, a significant increase in private wealth, and a concurrent boom in real estate. This has been further boosted by a sharp increase in private philanthropy in the arts, resulting in many new private museums and corporate-backed art foundations.
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But the art fair landscape in Asia has become more crowded in the past several years, with new fairs debuting in Seoul, Tokyo, and Singapore since fall 2022. Add to this that the India Art Fair is no longer the country’s only major art fair, with Art Mumbai’s debut last November. That has forced gallerists and collectors to prioritize which fairs to attend. But this year’s India Art Fair proved that it is still an essential one for the global fair calendar, as the VIP Day was jam-packed with overflowing crowds during the weekend, forcing the fair to impose visitor management measures.
One way the fair sought to combat increased competition was to scale up the fair’s number of exhibitors to more than 100. But, there were clear signs of growing pains as several additions this year, including booths for institutions and a focus on craft and traditional arts, led to many local contemporary galleries being squeezed into either smaller booths or suboptimal locations and layouts.
To differentiate itself from other regional fairs, the IAF turned to exhibitors specializing in design, inviting international leaders like Carpenters Workshop Gallery and de Gournay and top Indian ones like Atelier Ashiesh Shah, Vikram Goyal, Gunjan Gupta, and Rooshad Shroff.
Carpenters Workshop Gallery had an impressive debut at the fair, selling all of their large-scale pieces on the VIP day. Sales highlights included a Nacho Carbonell coffee table going for more than €300,000 ($324,000), a Karl Lagerfeld water fountain for €150,000 ($162,000), and several pieces by the Verhoeven Twins, including a Cinderella table in Carrara marble for just under €300,000 ($324,000) and their prismatic bubble-based work for a more accessible €20,000 Euros ($21,500).
“What is really heartening is that they have been acquired by individual Delhi- and Mumbai-based collectors, showing an appetite for the aesthetic that we have presented to the Indian audience,” Loïc le Gaillard, the gallery’s cofounder, told ARTnews.
Other international exhibitors like Galleria Continua also reported brisk sales. The booth’s showpiece was an Anish Kapoor work; priced at £650,000 ($700,000), the work had not sold by the fair’s end but was still on hold, the gallery said. Other highlights included two works by Ai Weiwei priced between €300,000 ($324,000) and €400,000 ($432,000) which sold to Indian private collectors, and a range of works by Eva Jospin, including her forest-like sculptures made from cardboard and embroideries made in collaboration with Mumbai-based Chanakya School of Craft, which were placed with institutions.
Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider returned after a three-year absence with works by Ai, Olafur Eliasson, and Shilpa Gupta, which gallery cofounder Tim Neuger called “a transcultural proposal” of the gallery’s roster. “They all speak a similar language focused on socio-political themes and are all very inclusive for broader audiences to engage with—both on the surface and at an intellectual level,” he said.
The fair presented a mix of artists not only from India and the West, but many Indian galleries exhibited artists from across South Asia. Rajeeb Samdani, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector who is one of Bangladesh’s leading patrons, said he found it heartening to see many artists from his country represented across multiple galleries at the fair this year.
The top Delhi-based galleries reported strong results as well. Vadehra Gallery pre-sold a major painting by late artist Tyeb Mehta for an undisclosed price and a piece by Rameshwar Broota for $200,000, and sold more than 25 works on the VIP, including pieces by Shilpa Gupta to a prominent European collection, and cabinets by Atul Dodiya at $80,000 each, also with an institutional buyer. Nature Morte significantly rehung its booth on the second day after frenetic sales the previous day, with gallerist Aparajita Jain confirming that almost 85 percent of the booth had sold on the VIP day. While the top billing was the Subodh Gupta sculpture for €250,000 ($ 270,000), a large Martand Khosla work, which attracted a lot of interest from visitors to the booth, sold for $25,000 to a new buyer.
Experimenter, which has spaces in Kolkata and Mumbai, said it sold around 80 percent of its works by the first day’s end, with multiple key works placed with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and a work by multi-disciplinary artist Afrah Shafiq placed with the Garage Museum in Moscow. Chemould Prescott Road, which has two locations in Mumbai, reported sales of their large Jitish Kallat on show to a private collector and also placed work with the Dubai-based Ishara Art Foundation and the private collection of its founder Smita Prabhakar.
Sabih Ahmed, the foundation’s director, said, “Our focus is to support the contemporary art of South Asia and its diaspora, so the India Art Fair it is not just about India in isolation but that of the subcontinent and its entanglement with the wider global histories.”