A Robb Report Map: Top High-Value Art Galleries In India

For the past few years, India has only observed a growing trend of several new and young collectors coming up on the art scene and some hefty money being spent on valuable art. From fairs to private acquisitions, record-breaking numbers have made rounds in the art landscape of the country. Most of the auction houses have posted record sales for modern Indian masters over the past few years and, as such, the galleries holding the deepest inventories of works of that nature have come to be destinations in their own right. Here are five of these addresses worth knowing.

DAG holds arguably the single largest privately assembled collection of Indian art spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Raja Ravi Varma, Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil, Nandalal Bose, Rabindranath Tagore's own paintings, and a long roll call of the Progressive Artists' Group, all moving through its programme at various points. The gallery started small, in 1993, when Rama Anand opened a modest space in the Hauz Khas quarter of Delhi. Later, her son Ashish Anand took over the business, and spent the following decades buying obsessively — studios, estates, private collectors, anyone sitting on work by artists nobody else was chasing at the time. Eventually, the inventory surged and is now said to run into tens of thousands of works. DAG has since expanded to Mumbai and New York, and it operates with a scale closer to a small institution than a commercial gallery: it has partnered with the Archaeological Survey of India to run museum exhibitions inside the barracks of Delhi's Red Fort and inside Kolkata's Old Currency Building, and it recently acquired Jamini Roy's own house and studio in Kolkata with plans to turn it into a single-artist museum. Its Mumbai space, in Kala Ghoda opposite the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, occupies a heritage building across four floors.

Vadehra opened in 1987 when modern Indian art was still a fairly niche interest. Over the years, it built its reputation on close relationships with exactly the artists who would go on to define the market. M.F. Husain, Ram Kumar, S.H. Raza and Tyeb Mehta were all represented before their prices went anywhere near where they sit today. The gallery later brought in the postmodern generation that followed — Arpita Singh, Nalini Malani, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Rameshwar Broota — and now represents artists across four generations, including contemporary names like Atul Dodiya and Shilpa Gupta. It runs from two adjoining spaces on D-53 and D-40 Defence Colony, a tree-lined residential market in south Delhi rather than a purpose-built museum district. The gallery shows regularly at Frieze London, Frieze New York and Art Basel, which is a fair measure of how far the programme has travelled from its Defence Colony beginnings.

Technically a public institution rather than a commercial gallery, the NGMA earns its place here on sheer inventory: more than 17,000 works, making it the country's largest repository of modern and contemporary Indian art, spanning roughly a hundred and fifty years from 1857 onward. From the landscape paintings of the Daniell brothers to the early Company paintings and the experimental works of Raza, the gallery has it all. It was formally inaugurated in 1954 by Vice-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in the presence of Jawaharlal Nehru, with German art historian Hermann Goetz brought in as its first curator. A new wing added in 2009, following an all-India design competition held back in 1985, increased the museum's floor area sixfold and added a conservation lab, auditorium and reference library. Trivia worth knowing: Jaipur House sits at the end of Rajpath — "the King's Way" — which crosses Janpath, "the People's Way," a bit of colonial town planning that has aged into unintentional irony now that the King's palace houses the nation's public art collection.

Less of a commercial gallery in the sense DAG or Vadhera is and more of a physical locus for the Mumbai art world, Jehangir Art Gallery is a venue where every major twentieth-century Indian artist, from Husain to Raza, has shown at some point in their career. Funded entirely by Sir Cowasji Jehangir, a Parsi industrialist and independence-era public figure who was urged into it by nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha and the painter K.K. Hebbar, the establishment opened on January 21, 1952, and was dedicated to the memory of Jehangir's late son. The gallery sits in Kala Ghoda of Mumbai, right behind the Prince of Wales Museum (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya). It boasts four exhibition halls and a terrace gallery reserved for photography. Once, it also had an attached Samovar café which has long since closed. For decades, it was the informal meeting point for Bombay's art crowd, and the building still houses Natesan's, reputed to be India's oldest licensed antique dealership. It closed for eleven months during the pandemic and has been fully open again since 2021.

Chemould is often credited as the first dedicated contemporary art gallery in Mumbai. It took off in 1941 as Chemould Frames, a picture-framing business run by Kekoo Gandhy, who through framing work met the Austrian émigré artist Walter Langhammer and, through him, the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group — Raza, Husain, F.N. Souza and others. Gandhy and his wife Khorshed opened Gallery Chemould properly in September 1963, on the first floor of the newly built Jehangir Art Gallery, turning a framing shop's back room into the launchpad for careers that would go on to define Indian modernism. Their daughter Shireen Gandhy took over direction in 1988 and has run it since, building relationships with artists such as Atul Dodiya, Anju Dodiya, Bhupen Khakhar and Jitish Kallat along the way, with pieces from the gallery's programme now sitting in the Tate Modern, MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Met. In 2007 the gallery relocated from its original first-floor perch to a larger space in Queen's Mansion on what was then Prescott Road (now G Talwatkar Marg) in the Fort district, and was renamed Chemould Prescott Road. Six decades on, it remains a family operation, and it still describes the framing business as the true origin point of its history rather than glossing over it, a rare instance of a gallery treating its trade roots as a credential rather than something to outgrow.