Galleries

The house on Shanthi Road belonged to Suresh Jayaram’s parents, and they gave him the floor above the family home to work in. He says 1Shanthiroad formally opened in 2002, though the seeds go back further; other accounts say 2003.

It is artist-run, and a non-profit trust, the Visual Art Collective, administers it. Alongside exhibitions it holds talks, screenings, workshops, music and performance, and it has run residencies with KHOJ, among them two in 2008 that paired Indian artists with artists from Pakistan and from Sri Lanka.

The gallery came out of collecting. Reena and Abhijit Lath speak of three generations of building collections behind it, and Akar Prakar opened in 2004. Its Kolkata gallery is at Hindustan Park.

A Delhi branch followed, first in Hauz Khas and now in Defence Colony. The artists it shows run from Abanindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy to the sculptor Meera Mukherjee, S H Raza and Ganesh Haloi, whose early abstract works the gallery took to Frieze Masters in London in October 2026.

Sharan Apparao’s first major exhibition, in 1983, was of Chinese paintings, and it went well enough that she opened a gallery the next autumn. She was twenty-two, with a degree in art history from Stella Maris College. It was called The Gallery; the family name came later.

In the early years it showed Indian modernists such as M F Husain and Sunil Das. In the early 1990s she held exhibitions of Jehangir Sabavala’s work to help pay for Colours of Absence (1993), Arun Khopkar’s film about him, and in 2002 she curated a large S H Raza retrospective at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai.

Sunaina Anand opened Art Alive in 2001 in Panchsheel Park, in south Delhi, where it still is.

Ten years in, in 2011, it opened a second space near HUDA City Centre in Gurgaon, reported at the time as the largest gallery in Delhi and the NCR. It has shown S H Raza, Krishen Khanna, Madhvi Parekh, Laxma Goud and Jogen Chowdhury, among others; Embodiment of Imagination ran in late 2020. It takes a stand at India Art Fair in Delhi.

Ebrahim Alkazi is remembered first as a theatre director; he ran the National School of Drama from 1962 to 1977. His wife Roshen designed the costumes for his plays. Art Heritage opened in 1977 in the Triveni Kala Sangam building on Tansen Marg; some accounts credit her as founder, others the couple.

Roshen Alkazi ran it until her death in 2007. The gallery reworks its rooms for each show and pairs its main exhibitions with catalogues written by scholars. Its sister body is the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal started the gallery in 2003. It held the first retrospective of Nasreen Mohamedi in 2004 and a performance by Nikhil Chopra in 2007, and it keeps an interest in twentieth-century print culture and popular image-making alongside new work.

ArtReview counts it among Mumbai’s best-known commercial galleries, well loved for giving young new-media artists a boost. For eighteen years it was at Kamal Mansion in Colaba, by the pier at the Gateway of India; in early 2026 it moved to a new space in Fort.

Before the gallery there was a frame shop. The family business on Princess Street in Bombay made mouldings and framed pictures, and the painters who called themselves the Progressive Artists’ Group came through it; Husain sold his first canvas from its window.

Gallery Chemould proper opened in 1963, run by Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy from the first floor of the Jehangir Art Gallery. Their daughter Shireen Gandhy has been its director since 1988. In 2007 the gallery moved to a loft in Queen’s Mansion on Prescott Road, in Fort, and took the name of its new street. In 2022 it added Chemould CoLab, a programme for newer artists.

Shireen Gandhy dates the family’s work with artists two decades earlier than 1963. Jerry Pinto’s book Citizen Gallery (2022) tells the longer story.

Clark House started among filing cabinets. In 2010 Sumesh Sharma and Zasha Colah began showing art in a disused shipping office, once the filing department of the Thakur Shipping company, just off a roundabout near the Mumbai port, and called it a curatorial collaborative.

It turned into a union of artists, run by seventeen of its members, and its shows keep returning to political and artistic figures pushed to the margins. It has worked with institutions abroad, among them The Showroom in London.

DAG started small, as Delhi Art Gallery in Hauz Khas in 1993. Wikipedia and Apollo credit Rama Anand, whose family had moved to Delhi from Amritsar. Her son Ashish Anand joined in 1996 and runs it; DAG’s own page says he has led it since its inception.

Ashish Anand made it a rule that shows come with well-researched catalogues by scholars, and the habit stuck. Exhibitions now read like small museum surveys, such as Kali: Reverence and Rebellion, curated by Gayatri Sinha at Kolkata’s Alipore Museum for the first Bengal Biennale.

A Mumbai gallery opened in Kala Ghoda in 2013, with a show on the Progressive Artists’ Group, and one in New York’s Fuller Building in 2015. The name became three letters.

It began as a shop. Ram Babu Jain ran a printing and stationery business in Chawri Bazaar, and in 1936 he opened Dhoomimal Dharamdas in the new Connaught Place.

The Delhi Silpi Chakra was formed in March 1949 by artists including B C Sanyal, Kanwal Krishna, K S Kulkarni and Dhanraj Bhagat, many of them uprooted by Partition. On 7 October that year it opened a gallery on the shop’s mezzanine, and that gallery became Dhoomimal Gallery. It is often called India’s oldest gallery, a claim that comes mostly from the gallery itself.

Two family galleries now carry the name: Dhoomimal Gallery and Dhoomimal Art Centre.

Emami Art was founded by R S Agarwal and R S Goenka of the Emami Group. The gallery gives 2017 as its founding year; one press profile says 2016. Richa Agarwal leads it.

It opened its doors on 21 November 2018 inside the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, a multi-disciplinary arts centre, with 10,000 sq ft of gallery floor and a first show, School, of work by Dashrath Patel. The scale shows in the programme: in 2019, Rasa, G Ravinder Reddy’s first solo show in Kolkata, and Reverie and Reality, six decades of Jogen Chowdhury’s paintings curated by Ranjit Hoskote.

Exhibit 320 grew out of Rasika Kajaria’s collecting. Its first show, Continuum Transfunctioner, curated by Gitanjali Dang, opened in the winter of 2010 in Lado Sarai, in south Delhi. Kajaria founded it and directs it.

The programme takes in Indian art and work from the wider subcontinent, with a leaning toward new materials and media; Shelly Jyoti’s ajrakh-printed khadi showed with it at Art Dubai in 2024. It also set up a non-profit initiative, 1after320.

For its fifteenth year, in August 2025, Deeksha Nath curated Shared Worlds at Bikaner House, with more than thirty artists. The gallery is one of those behind Delhi Contemporary Art Week.

Prateek Raja had wanted a gallery for years; Priyanka Raja left a media job to help build one. They spent a year visiting artists before Experimenter opened on Hindustan Road in Kolkata in 2009, meant from the start as something other than a plain white cube.

The programme grew sideways. The Curators’ Hub, a yearly gathering, began in 2012. Experimenter Books followed in 2016, a second Kolkata space on Ballygunge Place in February 2018, and the first Experimenter Outpost in 2019. A Mumbai gallery opened in 2022.

Both founders were named to ArtReview’s Power 100 in 2020.

Supriya Banerjee opened Galerie 88 in Kolkata in 1988 and worked with established names: M F Husain, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, Meera Mukherjee, Ganesh Pyne, Somnath Hore and K G Subramanyan among them. Her daughter, Sree Goswami, grew up in its rooms, and in 2006 opened Project 88 in Mumbai as an independent extension of it.

The gallery is at 28-B Shakespeare Sarani, in the Elgin area. In 2026 Project 88 held a retrospective of the Kolkata painter Shanu Lahiri.

Usha Mirchandani began as an art dealer and consultant in Bombay in the mid-1980s, under the name The Fine Art Resource. Her daughter Ranjana Steinruecke joined her, and from 1997 to 2003 ran a gallery in Berlin that showed Indian artists such as Atul Dodiya, Jogen Chowdhury and Bhupen Khakhar. The gallery came to Mumbai under its present name in 2006.

In 2022 it moved to a 5,000 sq ft space in Ballard Estate, in Fort. A second gallery, in Defence Colony, New Delhi, opened in November 2024 with drawings and paintings by Aji V N. Its list leans toward Kerala, with Sosa Joseph and Siji Krishnan among its artists.

Gallery Espace began with a friendship. M F Husain was close to the Modi family and in the mid-1980s designed their house in New Delhi. When he spoke of the need for professionally run galleries, Renu Modi, who had no formal training in art or art history, decided to open one.

The first show, in October 1989, was of Husain’s autobiographical work, in a small boardroom of a corporate office in the New Friends Colony market. The gallery is still at that address, and its logo, a galloping horse, is his drawing.

For its 35th year, in 2024, Gayatri Sinha curated Memory Fields, a show of 38 Indian artists. It is one of the Delhi galleries behind Delhi Contemporary Art Week.

Premilla Baid collected art for eight years before she started showing it. Sumukha opened in Bengaluru in 1996 and in its first two decades showed more than a hundred artists, mixing contemporary work with folk practice and craft.

It is at 24/10 BTS Depot Road in Wilson Garden. Champa Sharath and G Ravinder Reddy are among the artists it has shown. Baid began the gallery’s thirtieth year, in 2026, with In Search of the Perfect Image: eight of Reddy’s works across fifteen years, ending in new wall reliefs that ask whether one of his heads needs volume to look monumental.

Sunitha Kumar Emmart opened the gallery in Bangalore in 2003; SKE is her initials. In 2012 she placed it between the non-profits and the purely commercial galleries, and said she would rather back an unknown artist than chase an established one. Sudarshan Shetty, Sheela Gowda and Bharti Kher are among the artists she worked with early.

In 2013, its tenth year, it opened a Delhi space in Connaught Place, and in 2016 moved there into rooms shared with PHOTOINK, a photography gallery, in Vasant Kunj. In Bangalore it keeps a secondary office. Its list has included Astha Butail, Prabhavathi Meppayil and Tara Kelton.

The painter K K Hebbar and the physicist Homi Bhabha pressed for a proper exhibition hall in Bombay; Sir Cowasji Jehangir, the second baronet, paid for one in memory of his late son, Jehangir. B G Kher, then Chief Minister of Bombay, opened it on 21 January 1952. Sources disagree on the architect: G M Bhuta or Durga Bajpai.

It sits at Kala Ghoda, beside the Prince of Wales Museum, now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. A committee runs it; there are four main exhibition galleries, with an auditorium hall, the Hirji Jehangir Gallery and a terrace gallery for photography, and entry is free. Gallery Chemould started life on its first floor in 1963.

Amrita Jhaveri headed Christie’s in India from 1995 to 2000, then set up an independent consultancy; her sister Priya joined in 2006. A 2008 show of Simryn Gill led to the gallery, which first operated from Amrita’s apartment on Walkeshwar Road in Malabar Hill.

It opened as Jhaveri Contemporary in 2010, the year it staged Anish Kapoor’s first public exhibition in India. Its presentation of Mohan Samant won the Stand Prize at Frieze New York in 2018, and it looks after the estates of Mrinalini Mukherjee and Anwar Jalal Shemza.

Since 2018 it has occupied the third floor of Devidas Mansion, a nineteenth-century building in Colaba, with balconies facing the Gateway of India.

KHOJ began as a workshop. In 1997 Pooja Sood and a group of Delhi artists, among them Anita Dube, Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher and Manisha Parekh, organised an international gathering at Modinagar with the support of the Triangle Arts Trust in London. Twenty-two artists came, from India and from countries including Cuba, Kenya, Pakistan and South Africa.

In 2002 it moved into its own building in Khirkee Extension, an urban village in south Delhi. Sood is its director. In 2025 it held a fundraising exhibition, at a hard time for Indian non-profits.

Bhavna Kakar opened it in 2010 in Lado Sarai, at F-208, and has run it since; she is also the editor and publisher of the art magazine TAKE on Art.

The gallery leans toward research-led work and artists who think through materials. In November 2025, for its fifteenth year, it opened a second space in Defence Colony with Dramaturgies of Space, curated by Satyajit Dave. It is one of the Delhi galleries behind Delhi Contemporary Art Week.

The name had a first life. Peter Nagy, an artist, opened Nature Morte with the artist Alan Belcher in New York’s East Village in 1982, and ran it until 1988.

He moved to India in 1992 and reopened Nature Morte in New Delhi in 1997, as both a commercial gallery and a curatorial project for South Asian art. Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Jitish Kallat and Mrinalini Mukherjee were among the artists he backed early. Aparajita Jain later joined him as co-director, and a Mumbai space opened in January 2024 in Dhanraj Mahal, Colaba, with a Subodh Gupta solo.

Nagy died on 13 October 2026, aged 67, after a long illness. The galleries remain open, as he wished.

Sree Goswami grew up around her mother’s gallery in Kolkata, Galerie 88. After a diploma in contemporary art from the Sotheby’s Institute in London she worked at its Mumbai outpost, and in 2006 opened Project 88 as an independent extension of it.

The building matters here. It was a metal printing press, more than a hundred years old, in Colaba, and Rahul Mehrotra restored it as about 4,000 sq ft of exhibition space, leaving the old double beams in view. The address is the BMP Building on N A Sawant Marg.

Artists it has worked with include Raqs Media Collective, Tejal Shah and Rohini Devasher. In 2026 it held a retrospective of the Kolkata painter Shanu Lahiri.

The Pundoles had sold clocks and watches from 369 Dadabhai Naoroji Road, at Flora Fountain, since 1886, and they also framed pictures. Artists and collectors kept coming to the frame shop, and in 1963 Kali Pundole opened a gallery on the same premises, the year Gallery Chemould opened. It was one of the earliest galleries in the city’s post-independence art world, with long ties to M F Husain, V S Gaitonde, K H Ara, F N Souza and Ram Kumar.

Kali’s son Dadiba Pundole joined as an apprentice in 1980 and took over the gallery when his father died in 1990.

Geetha Mehra opened Sakshi in Chennai. The gallery gives 1986 as its founding year; a 2010 press account says 1984. In its first decade it ran spaces in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Pune, and in 1992 Mehra moved its base to Mumbai, because she felt that was where the action was. It is now in Colaba.

Mehra wrote about the early years herself, in an essay published in 2002. She and V Sanjay Kumar are its directors.

For its fortieth year, in January 2026, the gallery mounted The Fourth Wall, which went back over its first decades with work by Krishen Khanna, K G Subramanyan, Sudhir Patwardhan and Rekha Rodwittiya, among others.

Shrine Empire was started in 2008 by Anahita Taneja and Shefali Somani. Its artists come from across South Asia; the Bangladeshi artist Tayeba Begum Lipi, whose sculpture Her Clip 1 (2022) is made of stainless-steel razor blades, showed with the gallery at Art Dubai in 2023.

In April 2026 the gallery opened a new 2,400 sq ft space at B-24 Defence Colony, designed by Vritima Wadhwa of Project 810, with a group show titled Prakriya / Process. It is one of the Delhi galleries behind Delhi Contemporary Art Week.

Hena Kapadia opened TARQ in 2014. The name comes from a Sanskrit word for debate or dialogue, and the gallery runs on it: shows come with walkthroughs, talks and workshops, and the list leans toward young artists.

For almost ten years it occupied rooms in Dhanraj Mahal, an Art Deco building in Colaba. In 2023 it moved to a larger ground-floor space in a century-old building in Fort, KK (Navsari) Chambers on A K Nayak Marg, which had stood largely empty for two decades; the architect Katsushi Goto reopened its twin arched windows to let in daylight.

Threshold began far from the Delhi circuit. In 1997 Tunty Chauhan was living in Visakhapatnam, where she showed Patachitra painters from Raghurajpur in Odisha and the graduating students of the local fine arts faculty. From 1998 she ran an annual artists’ workshop there, and senior artists such as Arpita Singh, Jogen Chowdhury and Bhupen Khakhar came to work.

After she moved to Delhi in 2001 she set up a small room of about 400 sq ft in Sarvodaya Enclave, and showed in borrowed halls for some years. The gallery has been back in Sarvodaya Enclave since 2016, at C-221, opposite IIT, still run by Chauhan. It marked twenty-five years in September 2023 with Reflecting the Self, a show of self-portraits at Bikaner House.

Arun Vadehra came to art from the family construction business, by way of interior decoration. The gallery gives 1987 as its founding year; an older magazine account puts the opening in 1986.

It showed M F Husain, Ram Kumar, S H Raza and Tyeb Mehta early, and the roster now spans four generations of artists from the subcontinent and its diaspora. Publishing has been part of the work since 1996, with books and monographs made with Penguin, Prestel and König. A show of N S Bendre filled its D-40 building in the winter of 2021-22.

It occupies two addresses in Defence Colony, D-40 and D-53, and is directed by Roshini and Parul Vadehra. It is one of the galleries behind Delhi Contemporary Art Week.