Art Mumbai 2025 Is Here — Here’s Everything You Need To Know
South Asia’s biggest art fair returns to Mahalaxmi Racecourse with more than 80 galleries, 2,000 works, and a global edge
By now, Mumbai’s November calendar has a fixture that’s as much about who’s showing up as what’s on show. Art Mumbai — South Asia’s biggest modern and contemporary art fair — returns this month (13–16 November) to Mahalaxmi Racecourse for its third edition.
In just three years, it has gone from being a promising new entrant to an anchor on the region’s art circuit, attracting collectors, curators, artists, and international galleries looking eastward for the next big conversation in contemporary culture.
But this year’s fair doesn’t just expand in size, it’s so much more. What began in 2023 as a promising upstart has, in three years, become South Asia’s most serious contender on the international art circuit. The numbers alone tell part of the story: 82 exhibitors, over 2,000 works, and a lineup that reads like a roll call of the region’s most influential galleries. But beneath the scale, Art Mumbai 2025 feels more like a declaration — that South Asian art isn’t peripheral anymore.
Here’s everything you can expect this year.
The Sculpture Park: Reclaiming Space and Scale
The new Sculpture Park — the fair’s most talked-about addition — is a sprawling, open-air exhibition that brings together some of the most compelling women artists working in sculpture today. Think of it as part landscape, part statement: monumental works by Adeela Suleiman, Meera Mukherjee, Shambhavi Singh, Tarini Sethi, and several others rise from the racecourse lawns, confronting themes of identity, memory, and material transformation.
In a region where sculpture has often been boxed into public commissions or decorative sidelines, this outdoor experiment feels quietly radical. It’s about women artists claiming physical and cultural space — literally reshaping the ground beneath an art form long overshadowed by painting.
The Tyeb Mehta Moment
The headline event this year is the Tyeb Mehta centennial retrospective, jointly presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the Tyeb Mehta Foundation, and the Saffronart Foundation. You can expect Mehta’s key paintings, drawings, and archival material rarely seen together — a deep cut into the modernist who shaped India’s post-Independence visual language.
The Galleries: Local Giants and International Players Alike
For all its new experiments, Art Mumbai still plays to its core strength — being a meeting point. Since its 2023 debut, the fair has grown by over 60 percent, with this edition adding 17 new exhibitors (nine of them international). Indian heavyweights like Chemould Prescott Road, Nature Morte, DAG, and Vadehra Art Gallery will share space with global names like Lisson Gallery, Sundaram Tagore, Ben Brown Fine Arts, and Galleria Continua — a reminder that Mumbai’s art scene no longer looks inward.
This cross-pollination is what gives the fair its edge. It’s where a collector from Delhi might first see a young Bangladeshi sculptor’s work, or where a European curator realises that South Asian modernism is not an archival curiosity but a living, evolving practice. It’s art diplomacy at its most organic.
The Speaker Series
The Speaker Series — now a fixture — brings in thought leaders to unpack everything from “Funding Futures: Investing in Change” (on how South Asian patronage is reshaping global art markets) to a deep-dive on “Myth and Modernity: 100 Years of Tyeb Mehta,” marking the artist’s centennial year.
Panels on architecture, collecting culture, and cultural exchange with the Middle East round out the programme, reflecting how Art Mumbai has moved beyond mere display into discourse. Some examples include a series titled “Fusion of Forms”, which looks at architecture in cities like Mumbai and Dhaka; and “Middle East Cultural Corridors”, which is a discussion with museum directors from Sharjah to Riyadh about how the art world’s south-south networks are evolving.
The Bigger Picture
To call Art Mumbai an art fair now feels slightly reductive. It’s part cultural summit, part market, part social barometer for a city in flux. In its third edition, it’s no longer content to simply show art; it’s curating how South Asia sees itself and how the world sees it in return.
What began as a local platform is fast becoming a global one, with the fair’s founders — Minal and Dinesh Vazirani, Nakul Dev Chawla, and Conor Macklin — steering it with a balance of ambition and authenticity. Their vision is clear: to position Mumbai not as a satellite of the global art world, but as a centre of it.
As the fair opens next week, under the city’s hazy November skies, expect the usual mix — gallerists in linen, artists in black, collectors with a quiet sense of urgency.
Under the November haze, as 2,000 artworks light up Mahalaxmi’s lawns, Art Mumbai 2025 isn’t asking to be the next big fair. It’s already there.