A Walk Through What We Loved at India Art Fair 2026

Whether you’re an amateur just beginning to navigate the world of art or a seasoned collector with years of fair-hopping behind you, India Art Fair has a rare ability to beautifully merge the two worlds, where first-time viewers and long-time patrons are drawn into the same conversations around form, memory and meaning. The 2026 edition was no exception. The fair brought together some of the most compelling voices, materials and narratives shaping India’s creative landscape today. From galleries pushing material experimentation to booths rooted in craft, heritage and storytelling, here’s what we loved most at India Art Fair 2026.

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

One of the standout booths came from Rajiv Menon Contemporary, where colour, identity and diasporic narratives took centre stage. The Los Angeles-based gallery’s installation featured recent works by Nibha Akireddy, Maya Seas, Melissa Joseph and others whose vibrant canvases and mixed-media pieces explored personal and collective memory. What I loved the most were Seas’s Lightworks, which was a luminous depictions of feminine joy punctuated with gold leaf and Joseph’s Future Heirlooms, a felt-on-felt work that felt both tactile and poetic, marrying formal beauty with deep cultural resonance.

KYNKYNY Art Gallery

Just down the aisles, KYNKYNY Art Gallery (Booth L08) offered a wonderfully grounded experience in material exploration. Sculptor Sandilya Theuerkauf’s work used found natural elements like bark, seeds, and vines to create relief-like sculptures that felt like fragments of forest landscapes distilled into art. Meenal Singh’s large-format oil paintings let pigment flow freely, evoking fluid, almost meditative landscapes, while Janardhanan Rudhramoorthy’s steel sculptures brought paradoxical lightness to heavy materials, echoing themes of presence and impermanence.

Jhaveri Contemporary

Elsewhere, Jhaveri Contemporary reminded visitors why it’s one of South Asia’s most dynamic galleries, curating a booth that felt like a conversation between heritage and experimentation. Textile-infused works such as Sayan Chanda’s All the Boons You Want, with long red tasselled threads cascading with energy, which sat alongside Shiraz Bayjoo’s layered, agricultural-inspired paintings that wove personal memory and post-colonial narrative into lush colour.

DAG

DAG (Delhi Art Gallery) brought another kind of breadth to the fair with its expansive “Past and Present” narrative, presenting works that traversed centuries. From classic Indian and Western pieces to mid-20th-century Raza landscapes and British colonial scenes of everyday life, DAG’s booth felt almost encyclopedic, a reminder of how historical and contemporary threads interweave in India’s ongoing art story.

Villa Swagatam x Æquo

One of the most refreshing collaborations at the fair, Villa Swagatam x Æquo booth showcased handcrafted furniture and objects that celebrated Indian craft traditions through a contemporary lens. Earthy materials, soft forms and mindful design made this space feel more like a lived-in sanctuary than a conventional art booth, and that was precisely its charm.

And while we couldn’t catalogue everything, the vibe across the fair made it clear that India Art Fair 2026 was a cultural heartbeat and a milestone in the country’s ever-expanding creative narrative.