Energising—there is no better word to describe the art calendar this year. The overall mood seemed one of optimism with galleries moving to newer homes and festivals looking beyond the usual centres of Delhi and Mumbai to expand their audience base in Jodhpur, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. A sense of synergy spilled over from 2024 as galleries continued to collaborate on events such as Mumbai Gallery Weekend and Delhi Contemporary Art Week. There was greater depth to the programming at the 10th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival and the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, with the focus on friendship economies and collaboration.
The Moderns continued to set records at auctions, while artists like Krishen Khanna celebrated milestone years. Performance art, textile-based works and newer engagements with sculpture could be seen through 2025, especially at fairs such as Art Mumbai and the Sculpture Park in Jaipur. Key contemporary voices from the Global South, especially from Sri Lanka, made their presence felt at exhibitions and institutional shows to offer newer perspectives on living with conflict.
The Middle East, particularly Qatar, emerged as a centre for Indian art as the Lawh Wa Qalam: M.F. Husain Museum opened its doors to the public in November. Such is the growing significance of this region that Art Basel has announced a new edition to be held in Doha in February next year, where artists from India and the diaspora will be connected with an expanded collector base.
The key moments from the year gone by are likely to set the tone for 2026 with themes of ecological fragility, agrarian distress, speculative futures, and displacement becoming a leitmotif in artistic vocabularies. Interdisciplinarity will continue to inform festivals and events—a case in point being the upcoming Architecture & Design Film Festival (9-11 January) in Mumbai, which will bring together cinema, architecture, design and art.
There is a greater response to the “city”, its neighbourhoods and communities both in the programming as well as in the subjects of artworks. Take the ongoing St+art Kolkata Festival (until January 15) with its ADDA: The Third space, which pays a tribute to the city’s adda culture and transforms public spaces into places of shared experiences around art. As part of the upcoming Mumbai Gallery Weekend (8-11 January), DAG will showcase Face to Face: A Portrait of a City, in which centuries of portraits will reveal different facets of Bombay through the people who shaped it. In the process, it will also trace the evolution of portraiture from a Western academic construct to a modernist style. At Priyasri Art Gallery in Mumbai, in the group show Necropolis of Remains, artists like Hina Bhatt, M.D. Mussthafa and Suraj Kamble will respond to Mumbai’s garbage mounds, exploring habits of consumption and the city’s relationship with waste.
But before getting into the new year’s calendar, here are the takeaways from 2025.
REIGN OF THE MODERNS
At international and domestic auctions, Tyeb Mehta, S.H. Raza and V.S. Gaitonde continued to do well. At Saffronart’s 25th anniversary live auction in April, Trussed Bull (1956) by Tyeb Mehta broke the artist’s own record, selling for ₹61.8 crore, nearly nine times higher than its estimate. It joined Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Story Teller (1937) as the second highest value work by an Indian artist sold at a sale. At another of the auction house’s sales in September, Untitled (1970) by Gaitonde sold for ₹67.08 crore, nearly three times its estimate. Similarly, at AstaGuru’s ‘Historic Masterpieces’ sale in December, world records were set for artists Krishen Khanna and Walter Langhammer. Meanwhile, M.F. Husain’s extensive oeuvre found a new home in Doha at a museum designed from a sketch by him. Even as people from India made their way to Lawh Wa Qalam to see his works, sadly back home, his life and art continued to court controversy and vilification by fundamentalist groups.
MILESTONE YEARS
Galleries and institutions came up with special programming to commemorate landmarks for artists Krishen Khanna, Tyeb Mehta and Satish Gujral. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art along with the Tyeb Mehta Foundation and the Saffron Art Foundation showcased Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (with the lightness of being) at Art Mumbai to mark the birth centenary of the modernist. Viewers were treated to some of the artist’s most celebrated series such as Trussed Bull, Kali and Mahishasura— which are not often shown in public—alongside early drawings and paintings.
Khanna’s extensive oeuvre was highlighted at numerous exhibitions in 2025 as the last surviving member of the Progressive Artists’ Group turned 100. Uma Nair curated Three Moderns in Delhi, featuring four works from his iconic Bandwalla series alongside sculptures by Himmat Shah and bronzes by Thota Vaikuntam. The National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, too hosted Krishen Khanna at 100: The Last Progressive, across four floors, featuring his Partition paintings, abstract paintings and murals.
The new year will witness centenary celebrations of Satish Gujral, with a major retrospective curated by Kishore Singh to open at the NGMA Delhi. Satish Gujral: A Century of in Form, Fire and Vision (9 January to 31 March), organised by the Gujral Foundation, will pay tribute to his sevendecade-long journey as a painter, sculptor, architect and thinker. There will also be an architectural retrospective and opening of the Gujral House in January.
It is not just artists but contemporary art galleries too that will be marking key milestones next year, with Sakshi Gallery in Colaba, Mumbai, celebrating its 40th year with a new show during the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, and Art Alive in Delhi turning 25 with a series of special programmes.
ROOTED IN THE SOIL
Some powerful practices, rooted in the soil of India, were highlighted at several platforms across the year. Artists like Kulpreet Singh, Gyanwant Yadav and Birender Yadav created poignant commentaries on the plight of farmers, agrarian rights and the lives of migrant labour. At the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Birendar Yadav pays a tribute to the nameless and faceless migrant labour employed in the brick kilns of Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, in Only The Earth Knows their Labour, at Coir Godown. “The labourers are absent, but their presence is felt in every exhibit in the installation, from the tools to the bent and broken spinal cord; their labour refuses to disappear,” states the exhibition note.
Kulpreet Singh highlighted the condition of farmers amid the political and ecological realities of India in Fossils of Force at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke earlier this year. He will be presenting the Extinction Archive at the seventeenth edition of the India Art Fair (5-8 February) as an extension of his investigation into the ecological and social violence inflicted on the land and labour.
NEW ART HUBS
2025 saw the opening up of new galleries and existing ones moving to new spaces. Latitude 28, in a bid to mark 15 years of contemporary art making, shifted to a new address in Delhi’s Defence Colony, with an expanded vision, “one that bridges art, research and dialogue”. Sameksha Gallery, supported by the IILM Centre for Arts and Ideas, became the latest addition to the Capital’s cultural landscape as it opened withAn Invisible Bind,a group show of five women artists. Gallery Espace started a new project space, located just above the main gallery, as a fluid site for practice and exchange of ideas. “Designed to move beyond the traditional format, the space will host screenings, performances, workshops and exhibitions, with focus on emerging or under-represented practices,” states the gallery note.
However, the most heartening trend of the year has been decentralisation of art as initiatives, exhibitions and festivals moved beyond Delhi and Mumbai to tier 2 and 3 cities. Besides existing initiatives such as the Serendipity Arts Festival, which takes place in Panjim, Goa, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, audiences in cities such as Hyderabad saw a strengthening of the local creative ecosystem.
India Art Fair, for instance, hosted IAF EDI+IONS in the city in a bid to support artists, galleries and collectors there. Ahmedabad, which has seen several new art spaces open up in recent times, also served as a backdrop to the Ahmedabad Cultural Week in October this year featuring a ten-day-long celebration of heritage, community and art. Around the same time, the inaugural edition of the Jodhpur Arts Week was also held to centre the local community as co-creators alongside invited artists. The coming year will see newer initiatives in cities like Pune and Vadodara.