What to Actually See at India Art Fair 2026
The exhibitions that define India Art Fair 2026
For anyone new to contemporary art, an art fair can feel like walking into a conversation already in progress. Names are floating around while price negotiations are being whispered. People gawk at you if you don’t know who this new artist in the city is. I understand that art fairs don’t entirely remove that intimidation – but if there’s anywhere in Delhi to enter the art world and feel lost in the crowd while you really take your time to absorb and learn, it’s the annual Art Fair.
Now in its 17th edition, India Art Fair has reached a point of maturity where it no longer needs to shout. Solo presentations have become sharper. Even the most ambitious installations are anchored in ideas that reward curiosity rather than insider knowledge. If you’ve ever wondered why certain galleries matter, or what makes particular artists worth following, this is the year the answers are unusually clear.
These are the exhibits and galleries that best articulate what contemporary art can do—and why it’s worth your time.
Bharti Kher at Nature Morte
What's showing: Weather Painting: Point Zero (2025) plus accompanying sculptures
Kher hasn't touched painting in twenty years. She built her reputation on sculpture and installation—bindis, found objects, that fiberglass elephant everyone remembers. So her return to the medium isn't nostalgia, but a deliberate pivot. Weather Painting: Point Zero is big, visceral, all saturated reds and earthen tones with orbital brushwork that channels the kinetic energy of her sculptural practice. The paintings are surrounded by sculptures exploring spirals and what the press release calls "animist notions of living matter".
Tyeb Mehta at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
What's showing: 120+ works—paintings, drawings, sculptures, film, archival material
This is the big one. Mehta's birth centenary retrospective, curated by Roobina Karode, is the first comprehensive look at one of India's most important modernists. You get the iconic series: Falling Figure, Falling Bird, Bull, Diagonal—all the work dealing with conflict and the human condition that came out of witnessing Partition and post-Independence chaos. But also the Mahishasura and Kali series engaging with mythology, plus his 1970 film Koodal (Tamil for 'meeting place'), which is about image synthesis and human coexistence. The archival material—early studies, notebooks, photographs, exhibition materials—gives you the process behind the finished work. This isn't at the fair itself, it's at KNMA, but if you skip it you're missing the entire historical context for half the modernist work being sold on the fairgrounds.
Afrah Shafiq: A Giant Sampler
What's showing: Large-scale digital installation on the fair's façade
This is the BMW x India Art Fair commission, and it's the first thing you'll see. Shafiq, based in Goa, works with embroidery samplers—those teaching tools women have used since the 1500s to learn needlework. She's pulled motifs from Mexican, Egyptian, East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern fabric traditions and created a digital tapestry displayed on the building itself. There's an AR component: scan it with your phone, learn about embroidery forms globally. The work's really about women's labour, the visual languages that get dismissed as craft rather than art, and how those traditions move across cultures. Shafiq merges old handiwork with code and new media, so you get this collision of the ancient and the digital.
Jayasri Burman at Art Alive Gallery (Focus Section)
What's showing: Impermeable—multidisciplinary installation based on her poetry collection Tumi, Maa
Burman's known for maximalist, myth-heavy work, and Impermeable continues that but adds environmental awareness. She's taking the divine feminine and filtering it through ecological crisis. Myth-inspired paintings interwoven with poetic text, dissolving the line between word and image. The project translates "Maa" (mother) into three-dimensional form. It could easily tip into decorative excess—Burman's visual language runs that risk—but when it works, you're standing inside a space where mythology stops being metaphorical and becomes a way of thinking about care and ecological empathy.
Ashfika Rahman: Of Land, River, and Body
What's showing: Three interconnected bodies of work—Than Para: No Land Without Us, Files of the Disappeared, Behula These Days
Rahman won the 2024 Future Generation Art Prize, and this is her first solo in India. Rahman is a Bangladeshi multi-disciplinary artist dealing with displacement, erasure, fear. Her mother was a social worker, and Rahman's revisiting marginalized communities and systemic suppression through archival practice. Than Para is about land rights, Files of the Disappeared is self-explanatory, and Behula These Days reworks Bengali mythology through contemporary violence. The work creates an archive of lives shaped by dispossession—voices that don't usually get heard, let alone preserved.
David Zwirner
What's showing: Yayoi Kusama sculptures and paintings in conversation with Marcel Dzama, Suzan Frecon, Huma Bhabha
To hear that David Zwirner is one of the most powerful galleries in the world is probably an understatement. Zwirner’s India Art Fair presentation makes that logic visible. This year, the booth stages a conversation between artists who approach form, psychology, and material from radically different positions. Yayoi Kusama’s sculptural work offers repetition and infinity as emotional experience. Marcel Dzama’s fantastical imagery leans into narrative and imagination. Huma Bhabha’s raw, bodily sculptures confront fragility and violence without ornament. For newcomers, this booth clarifies how global contemporary art functions: influence isn’t about geography, but about how ideas travel.
Sarita Handa & Ashiesh Shah (Design Section)
What's showing: Textile-based contemporary design (Handa); furniture and spatial objects (Shah)
The Design section's gotten more conceptually serious, and these two showcase why. Handa works where textile heritage meets contemporary design language. Her practice isn't about making pretty fabrics—it's about material memory, about how craft traditions carry knowledge that's not written down. Shah's furniture feels less like objects to sit on and more like spatial propositions. His work asks what furniture does besides function. Both are playing with the collapse between art and craft, between fine and applied, and doing it without the usual anxiety about those distinctions.
HH Art Spaces: Breakfast in a Blizzard
What's showing: Live performance series—Yuko Kaseki, Uriel Barthélémi, Suman Sridhar
Here, you'll find an open-air kitchen that will never serve food; a Japanese Butoh dancer, a French sound artist, and then maybe an Indian experimental musician doing "conceptual cooking." Kaseki's Butoh practice is post-war Japanese avant-garde, all about presence and embodying the outsider. Barthélémi makes sound physical—his work is genre-bending improvisation exploring what sound does to space. Sridhar pulls from cinema scores, jazz, Indian classical, opera into this cosmopolitan collision.
Jitish Kallat at Bikaner House: Conjectures on a Paper Sky
What's showing: Decade of work including Integer Studies (2021)—365 drawings visualizing time using population data
Kallat blends science, cosmology, mathematics, political thought. For him, art is research method, a way to investigate systems governing the world. Integer Studies is 365 drawings made daily, using population data to drive the shapes. It's a visualization of time's passage, of scale, of what it means when abstract numbers represent human lives. Curated by Alexandra Munroe from the Guggenheim, the show traces how Kallat's method and visual language let him move between extremes—intimate and massive, personal and political.
Rajiv Menon Contemporary
What's showing: Diasporic presentation—Melissa Joseph, Sahana Ramakrishnan, Rajni Perera, Shyama Golden, Maya Seas, Devi Seetharam, Nibha Akireddy, Tarini Sethi, Gisela McDaniel (India debut)
LA-based gallery making its IAF debut, and this year it's focused on South Asian diaspora. The booth brings together artists dealing with colour not as decoration but as inheritance, friction, cultural negotiation. McDaniel's India debut is the draw, but the whole presentation is about what happens when artists are shaped by "global circulation and cultural return"—making work from multiple cultural positions simultaneously, refusing the easy categories often imposed on South Asian art.
DAG
What's showing: Indian Past & Present
This year, DAG is presenting the richness of Indian art between the 18th and the 21st centuries. Their collection this year includes early Western and Indian artists such as Sewak Ram, Arthur William Davis, S H Raza, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Nirode Mazumdar, P T Reddy, Kanwal Krishna and Devayani Krishna, among others.
The fair runs 3pm-11pm daily. Build in time for the parallel programming—the Mehta show alone needs hours. Start outside with Shafiq's façade and Paresh Maity's Recycle of Life (27 sculptures, charred wood and recycled metal, 200 feet of environmental meditation). Then move through the halls with intention. You can't see everything, but honestly don't try. Just enjoy what’s in front of you, and then come back next year!
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