“Mumbai is loading” read the signboards girding some of the 10,000-or-so active construction sites across India’s financial capital. But as the 12th edition of Mumbai Gallery Weekend (MGW, 11-14 January) looks to prove, the city has already arrived—at least as far as its art market is concerned.

The event’s largest edition to date, with 34 participants, confirms Mumbai’s position as the dominant hub for India’s art trade. Several consecutive years of steady growth have seen most of its major dealers expand their footprints in the city. The recent launches of Mumbai outposts for two of India’s leading galleries—Experimenter from Kolkata and New Delhi’s Nature Morte—further emphasise the necessity of a physical presence in the city.

The past year has brought Mumbai’s art scene two further notable additions: its first art fair, Art Mumbai, whose inaugural edition took place in November, and a shiny new kunsthalle in the form of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), which, although less ambitious than other private Indian institutions, is helping to draw attention through its celebrity-studded openings.

Key players assert that the city’s construction projects are benefitting the market. “Real estate is going mad in this city and empty apartments need to be filled,” says Shireen Gandhy, the director of Chemould Prescott Road, the city’s oldest commercial gallery, who is chairing this year’s MGW. Tonight, it opens a show of graphic paintings and lightbox sculptures by Anant Joshi.

Even more important to Mumbai’s burgeoning art scene, Gandhy says, are the increased professionalisation of and collaboration among the city’s established dealers, who have recently formed the Mumbai Gallery Association—a parent organisation encompassing MGW and the crowd-pleasing Art Night Thursday gallery hops. “Over the past few years we’ve consolidated our position as a serious entity,” Gandhy says. “People will go to Delhi for its historical sites—but less so for its galleries, which are very spread out. Mumbai has much less to offer tourist-wise, but those in the art ecosystem actually come to the city for the commercial galleries, which are more concentrated together.”

Younger galleries are also making their mark this week. XXL, which launched last year and focuses on urban and post-graffiti art, will open its first permanent space today in the gallery hub neighbourhood of Colaba, with a nine-artist group show on typography and script. With works priced between $250 to $10,000, XXL offers more accessible price points than other MGW participants. Still, according to its founder, Joe Cyril, the gallery’s clients tend to be the same as those who purchase Modern and “more traditional” contemporary art, suggesting increasing diversification of the city’s private collections.

Also making its MGW debut this week is Akara Contemporary, a new venture from the 20th-century art gallery Akara Modern. This week it opens a show of beeswax and resin paintings and intricate pen drawings by Bhagyahsree Suthar. “This city’s market is seasoned,” says the gallery’s director, Puneet Shah. “Buyers here don’t have the space they do in other cities—but they do have money. Transactions tend to be more considered and more expensive here than elsewhere. In Mumbai you can’t put your regret purchases in a farmhouse.”

Even galleries not yet based in Mumbai are joining the MGW fray. Vidya Heydari, whose eponymous gallery is based in Pune, the second-largest city in Maharashtra state, after Mumbai, hopes to “connect with the city’s vibrant art community”. The gallerist adds that she is exploring the possibility of opening a space in Mumbai. Meanwhile, a show of new films and sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at the IFBE art space allows the artist’s gallery, Ske, which has locations in New Delhi and Bangalore, to be present in the city at this market moment.

The vibrancy and density of Mumbai’s art audience was apparent last night, when the weekend kicked off with a well-attended performance by Nikhil Chopra at 47-A gallery, in which the artist painted works live with lipstick—a primer for his first solo exhibition in India in five years, now on show at Chatterjee & Lal. Tonight many of the city’s best-known commercial spaces open shows, including Ashwini Bhat at Project 88 and Areez Katki at Tarq.

Meanwhile, a handful of non-gallery events will also draw in crowds, including the Mumbai premier of CAMP’s seven-channel video installation Bombay Tilts Down (2022), which debuted at the Kochi Biennale last year. It is now being screened at the Sassoon Docks, a public fish market and former port yard that has in recent years hosted art shows, in collaboration with Experimenter gallery.

Further hurdles

This buzz comes as secondary market sales at Indian auction houses are achieving record figures and global players are taking greater interest in India’s economy, amid a slowdown in China and stagnation in Europe.

Indeed, much of India can felt to be “loading”, with vast infrastructure projects underway across the country. But at what cost? While the rampant construction in Mumbai might be boosting art sales for now, its side effects could eventually hamper them. In recent years, the city’s air quality index ranking has plummeted, in part due to the dust generated by poorly regulated building sites, and which now regularly blankets the city in a white haze. Chronic respiratory diseases are reportedly on the rise in Mumbai; the 2020 State of Global Air report termed air pollution the “biggest health risk in India”.

“This pollution problem is a new reality—it hasn’t hit people yet but it will soon I expect. Visitors to Mumbai will begin turning back,” Gandhy says. “People now think twice before they go to Delhi because of its pollution. I fear that will happen to us soon.”

“For generations, we have been taught to bear the responsibility of keeping nature in its most untouched and purest form, but try as we might, Pandora’s box has been opened,” says London-based artist and designer Sam Wilde. His striking illustrations and public artworks portray an imagined world “where we just let everything go awry.”

Wilde, who as an undergraduate studied biology and conservation, is gripped by the realities of the climate crisis and the human impact on the planet. The British countryside, for example, famous for its verdant bucolic vistas, is rife with invasive and non-native flora and fauna. Due to agriculture, industry, and other human interventions, the vast majority of the U.K. has no true natural landscape at all.

“I think with maturity, I began to understand that, for the most-part, we each as individuals are all doing the best we can to look after the planet,” Wilde tells Colossal. “And ultimately, the blame lies in the macro—and not the micro choices—we each make day-to-day.”

Employing a lurid array of uncanny shapes like glowing flowers or mutated fruits, Wilde considers an alternate future when the environment as we know it has entirely vanished. He upends the concept of natural beauty by considering the artificial instead, “framing the question: could there be a kind of punk beauty to that?” he says. In two major public artworks, “Pollution Palace” and “Cat’s Charade,” both commissioned for municipalities in China, he envisions worlds turned upside-down where reality seems at odds with one’s surroundings.

“Pollution Palace” at night

Wilde is fascinated by the way we perceive beauty or pleasure and how the brain doesn’t distinguish a hierarchy between artificial and natural objects. He says:

It’s hard to articulate, but if we, say, look at a lava lamp, it feels enchanting and visually appealing and fires up our synapses with endorphins. And then by the same stroke, if we look at a big beautiful juicy melon, on a neurochemical level, it’s no doubt the same nervous system pathways being activated by that visual stimulation… And that’s what I’m trying to evoke with my works, stripping out the judgement/fear/anxiety around the manmade,and just for a moment escaping into a world where manmade and nature are one of the same.

In “Cat’s Charade,” inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, vibrant patterns redolent of radioactive flowers and a giant feline installed on top of a building instill a sense of delirium.  And in “Pollution Palace,” monumental inflatable sculptures shaped like hybrid pineapples and leggy blooms glow preternaturally at night. The installation takes as a starting point the tree of knowledge of good and evil, in the garden of Eden, reframing that knowledge as a tension between the organic and the human-made.

Wilde experiments with different techniques and types of projects, which range from watercolor paintings to digital illustration to textile designs. Explore more of his work on his website and Behance, and follow him on Instagram for updates.

“Cat’s Charade”

Left: “Pollution Palace” at night. Right: Installation view of “Cat’s Charade” (2023), Whuan, China

“Hubris Tree: Evergreen” (2019)

Work in progress for “Hubris Tree” (2019)

“Pollution Palace”

“Pollution Palace”

Work in progress for “Hubris Tree”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In Large-Scale Installations, Sam Wilde Imagines a Post-Natural Future in Lurid Color appeared first on Colossal.