Kapil Chopra, best known as a pioneering hotelier and founder of EazyDiner and The Postcard, has quietly built a significant contemporary art collection. Drawn to politically charged and socially observant works, he champions emerging Indian artists, treats art as both passion and asset, and integrates bold, experiential pieces into his luxury hotels to reflect a confident, modern India.
Years ago, Gurgaon did not have its current reputation. The expansive, corporate and grand city we see today was built on the backs of dreamy-eyed professionals hailing from the nooks and crannies of a developing India.
Today, Kapil Chopra is a career hotelier: he is the Founder of EazyDiner - India’s leading restaurant reservation platform as well as the Postcard hotel, India’s most awarded ultra-luxury hotel chain. Less widely known is the pursuit that postscripts this formidable professional legacy: Chopra is also an avid art collector, the founder of FORM Art and the owner of Art District XIII, a contemporary art gallery in Delhi. In the Gurgaon of yesteryear, Kapil Chopra was ahead of his time. As the inaugural General Manager of the Trident Gurgaon, he led the hotel to the city’s highest occupancy and average room rate in 2005 at just 31. This was the earliest in a succession of achievements that would eventually make him the youngest President of Oberoi and Trident Hotels globally.
Yet, while Chopra was transforming one institution, another passion was quietly taking root. During an exhibition devoted to art, architecture and design hosted at the Trident in 2006, the seeds of his enduring fascination with contemporary art were sown. Works were being positioned with artists and organisers moving through the buzzy room. It was the first time, he remembers, that he had really observed how a show was mounted, and it stayed with him long after the evening ended. This interest soon converted into research through extensive reading, and thereafter mobilised into action.
The first artwork Chopra acquired was a charcoal-on-paper work from Jogen Chowdhury’s Wounded series, purchased around 2006. It may not have appeared immediately spectacular or decorative, but he recognised its artistic significance and paid ₹7.5 lakh for it, a bold first acquisition. From then on, he bought an artwork almost every month.
Coming from outside the traditional art establishment, he frequented galleries for deepened understanding and identification with the ideologies of contemporary practice such as Nature Morte, speaking with its founder Peter Nagy, other gallerists and the artists themselves. He was drawn, for instance, to Balaji Ponna’s incisive political satire. Encounters such as these taught Chopra to look beyond visual appeal towards the social anxieties and encapsulation of an era embedded within a work.
He was equally struck by Siddhartha Kararwal's installation My Generation Is Silent, in which a bound donkey lay before a canvas bearing the work's title in graffiti-like script during the student riots. It was this deep resonance that catapulted the creation of his signature niche. Chopra realised that the most opportune moment to acquire works by the established masters had already passed; their prices had risen considerably over the preceding decade or two. Rather than pursue names that were already firmly canonised, he turned his attention towards younger contemporary artists with potential. His advice to young collectors is simple: buy what you love.
"Above roughly Rs 1 lakh, pricing should have a rationale: scale, established pricing, or auction records. Art is passion, but simultaneously an asset class as well and can be overvalued," he says.
Among the works closest to him is Seher Shah's monumental 10-by-6-foot work created for an early edition of the India Art Fair.
He is similarly attached to T. V. Santhosh’s Game Theory, which has been part of his collection since 2008. Painted in the artist’s characteristic fluorescent hues, the work depicts General Pervez Musharraf delivering a hate speech with his fist clenched, its political history growing more resonant for Chopra over time. Like most collectors, he remembers the work that escaped him. At a Nature Morte exhibition, he encountered an L. N. Tallur sculpture featuring a trunk into which coins had been hammered. He did not acquire it and believes it was later bought by Subodh Gupta. “It still stays in my mind,” he recalls. “I think I should have bought that work.”
Chopra has bought through auction houses such as Saffronart and FORM’s own auctions, yet he largely prefers galleries, which he calls the “oxygen givers” of the contemporary-art ecosystem. Otherwise, he says, the chances of becoming a Bollywood star may be greater than those of becoming a successful contemporary artist in India. For Chopra, learning about art has never been confined to studying it from a distance; rather cultivating relationships with artists. He points to Sidharth, whose contemplative practice reflects the years he spent studying with Tibetan monks. Creating his own pigments from minerals, earth and plants, Sidharth makes the material language of his paintings inseparable from the life he has lived.
His admiration extends from Biplab Sarkar's portrayals of India's street hawkers and Divyendu Anand's sculpture to Shilpa Gupta's conceptual practice. Gopal Samantray, Thukral & Tagra and Atul Dodiya are his other favourite artists. Together, these artists reflect the breadth of what compels him: political satire, social observation, inherited traditions, spirituality and artistic practices capable of turning the conditions of their time into visual form.
Chopra’s collection is ultimately not only a catalogue of what he deems worth preserving. It is a microcosm of what he has spent his career doing with EazyDiner and The Postcard: believing in an empowered, distinctive and luxurious India.