Christie’s Kiran Nadar Exhibition Is the Latest Indicator of the South Asian Art Market’s Growing Importance

India’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is taking its collection to Christie’s London this summer, though don’t expect any of its artworks to be for sale.

From July 16 to August 21, the New Delhi institution will stage “The Meeting Ground,” a non-selling survey of works from its 16,000-work collection at the auction house. The show will place Indian modernists like M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, K.G. Subramanyan, and F.N. Souza, alongside contemporary South Asian artists, practitioners of Indigenous art traditions, and artists from the diaspora. Admission to the exhibition is free.

The Christie’s—Kiran Nadar linkup arrives amid an inflection point for the Indian and South Asian art markets. South Asian modern and contemporary sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s have grown in size and value in the last five years, with such sales becoming an increasing focus of Asia New New York, as Karen Ho reported for ARTnews in 2024. Auction records have been broken repeatedly recently: In March 2025, Christie’s New York sold M.F. Husain’s monumental Untitled (Gram Yatra) (1954) for $13.8 million—a new auction record for modern Indian art, shattering a pre-sale estimate of $2.5–$3.5 million. Then, last month, Saffronart in Delhi broke that record, with the sale of Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda and Krishna (ca. 1890s) for $17.9 million.

The Indian collector base has also become more robust in recent years, led by collectors like Nita Ambani, founder of Reliance Foundation, the nonprofit arm of India’s largest private company, Reliance Industries, and Kiran Nadar, the founder and namesake of her eponymous museum and the wife of Shiv Nadar, founder of information technology multinational HCL Technologies, as Shreejaya Nair reported for ARTnews‘s annual Top 200 Collectors issue, also in 2024.

Meanwhile, the buyer of the record-breaking Husain? Nadar herself, who has continued to grow the museum into one of the most important nodes in the South Asian art ecosystem. Earlier this month, KNMA opened “Of Women Born,” a collateral event at the 2026 Venice Biennale by Nalini Malani. The immersive installation, which offers a feminist retelling of the Greek myth of Orestes, displays over 30,000 hand-drawn iPad animations across nine channels in Venice’s Magazzini del Sale. During the previous Biennale, KNMA staged an exhibition of work by Husain.

“International engagement is a pillar of our vision, opening up new frameworks for dialogue and scholarship,” Nadar said in a statement about the London exhibition.

KNMA is in the midst of a significant expansion. The museum, which opened in 2010 as India’s first private institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent, is currently building a new home near Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, a sprawling complex projected to exceed one million square feet, with multiple exhibition spaces, a performing arts center, a library and archive center, an education center, and several restaurants.

Christie’s is not the only auction house courting the South Asian market with exhibitions. In 2023, Sotheby’s London staged a non-selling exhibition of Raza’s work to concide with the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of the artist in Paris. “No matter where someone entered the building, they could not miss the Raza exhibition,” Manjari Sihare-Sutin, vice president and worldwide co-head Sotheby’s modern and contemporary South Asian art department, told ARTnews in 2024.

Christie’s is touting the historic nature of the exhibition, with Damian Vesey, Christie’s international specialist for South Asian modern and contemporary art, saying in a statement that it is “the first time Christie’s London has dedicated its summer exhibition to South Asia, as well as to a single institution.”