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“People are still afraid of how to navigate India. They think we are still going around on elephants,” says Aparajita Jain, co-owner and director of the country’s leading contemporary gallery, Nature Morte. The petite and punchy gallerist is on a mission to communicate the value of India’s contemporary culture to the rest of the world, as well as to the country’s sceptical public.
The opportunity is pertinent now that the country is going through an economic boom which spills on to its art market. At auction, India’s 20th-century artists, including FN Souza and MF Husain, are reaching new heights, while the contemporary art scene is expanding beyond Delhi, including to the aspirational upper-middle classes in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai. The renewed appetite for art comes as analysts forecast India’s economy will grow fastest in the world in 2024 and take Japan’s spot as the second largest in Asia after China by 2030.
Jain is in the thick of the activity. When we meet, it is during February’s buzzy 15th edition of the India Art Fair, at which Nature Morte sold the bulk of its booth, including a sculpture by Delhi-based international hero Subodh Gupta for €250,000. Down the road, in South Delhi’s hip Dhan Mill shopping area, the gallery opened an exhibition of new work by Polish-German rising star Alicja Kwade (until March 3). The previous month, Jain opened a Nature Morte outpost in Mumbai, in the Colaba gallery district, with a Gupta show (until March 9).
The gallerist is conscious that there are plenty of people who feel left behind — economically and culturally — while the good times roll for some under a populist government. “Artists here can start out extremely poor — I know of one who needed to sell their laptop in order to eat. So they are forced out of opportunities and need to be particularly strong-minded to get noticed and to succeed,” she says.
This was part of the thinking behind the Saat Saath Arts Foundation, a non-profit that she founded in 2010 to help educate the rest of the world about India’s art scene. Among its initiatives is a grant for international — mostly North American — museum curators to come to the country on an open-ended research trip.
Jain recognises too that barriers to contemporary art extend to India’s public. “People here know in their bones India’s traditional decorative objects but today’s art can make them feel belittled, which you never want,” she says. “In India, every day can be quite hard, so when people have time to pause, you don’t want to make it more difficult for them.”
She is open about her own relative wealth in India’s stratified society: “I was born to a privileged family and married into a privileged family.” Her father’s family are in the glassware industry (he is chair of Borosil, which they bought in 1988), and her husband, who used to run a chain of restaurants, now manages a family office. “I haven’t had to worry about the everyday,” she says. Such privilege means “I was brought up to believe in philanthropy and can take risks.”
One of these is the recently opened sculpture park in Jaipur’s 19th-century Madhavendra Palace within the 17th-century Nahargarh Fort. The indoor and outdoor showing, which runs for the best part of a year, opened its latest edition — its fourth since 2018 — at the end of January. The majority of this year’s 12 artists are from India, including Megha Joshi, who has made an installation out of incense sticks, and Nandan Ghiya, whose assemblage of recycled furniture and architecture refers to the wall paintings in the palace, exploring the impact of India’s booming property market on its architectural heritage. Kwade provides the centrepiece to the exhibition, with a steel-framed sculpture that mirrors its surroundings. Entry to the site is capped at the government’s fee of Rs50 (about 50p) for visitors from India.
The sculpture park is curated by Peter Nagy, Jain’s partner at Nature Morte. She bought a controlling interest in his gallery in 2012, having run her own platform for emerging artists before then, and of their working relationship says: “I’m instructive, he’s theoretical.”
Their Madhavendra Palace project — a collaboration between Jain’s foundation and the government of Rajasthan, with individual gallery support for their artists’ installations — encapsulates the reliance on the private sector that dominates India’s cultural scene, which has limited government support. Prominent collector-patrons in New Delhi include Kiran Nadar, whose private museum is set for a major expansion in 2026, and Shalini Passi, who runs her own foundation.
Jain is pragmatic about the dynamic. “Big change can happen from individuals with the force of their wealth. That’s not a bad thing,” she says. “The government needs to spend money on infrastructure, that’s the first need.” Being in New Delhi, where India’s government sits, means she too can be part of discussions around policy for the arts, Jain says.
She seems tireless in her activity though describes the art market as a “hamster wheel”. Events for the gallery after the India Art Fair this year include Art Dubai, the Armory and Frieze London, as well as the usual run of exhibition openings in both New Delhi and Mumbai. But now is not the time to stop. “Moments like this don’t wait,” Jain says. She recalls that India’s art market experienced a similar surge just before the global economic crash of 2007-08, which devastated the contemporary art scene. Lessons have been learnt along the way. “Buyers are more collectors and less speculators now,” she believes.
The market’s protagonists, including Jain, also seem more focused on the longer term than in the headier days of Bric economy optimism. Jain is clearly benefiting today but has a broader view of her role within the ecosystem: “There is a lift-off that happens when we expose the next generation to art — they start window shopping and then grow in confidence.”
