India Art Fair 2025: Delhi in artistic reverie

From an illustrated Ramayana to a dissident Chinese artist’s works that use lego bricks, a guide to the quiet, unmissable works

The India Art Fair’s 16th edition, which opened to the public earlier this week, has brought together 120 exhibitors, including 78 galleries, and international art institutions in its largest edition yet. The design section, which debuted last year, was expanded to include an exhibition of emerging designers, like the Nolwa studio from Hyderabad that employs Badri work on functional design like lamps and tables, and also features 11 well-established design studios like Gunjan Gupta and Vikram Goyal. Renowned modern and contemporary Indian artists, from Atul Dodiya to Sudarshan Shetty and Subodh Gupta, as well as some well known international names like Anish Kapoor and Julio Le Parc have been displayed in booths. HT scours the fair for some of the less known but remarkable works that should not be missed.

The Kanchana Chitra Ramayana from the 18th century.

Kanchana Chitra Ramayana: Glory of Indian traditional painting

View one of the most ambitious projects of illustration undertaken by painters over 200 years ago at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) booth. On display is a digital flipbook of a version of the Kanchana Chitra Ramayana manuscript, which allows the viewer to see the intricate illustrations on individual pages. Commissioned by the royal court of Benaras, artists belonging to different schools converged to work on Tulsidas’s Ramcharitramanas over a period of 18 years, between 1796 and 1814. Each page of text held a painting — in all there were 548. The manuscript is also called the Golden Illustrated Ramayana, because of the extensive use of gold paint in its folios. MAP was able to access the manuscript through the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), which had photographed the entire manuscript, and subsequently turned it into a digital version. The booth also offers a digital view of other exhibitions held in the privately-owned museum founded by Abhishek Poddar.

Jain Chhods: Intricately embroidered textiles that decked shrines

Nearly a hundred years ago, symbols of Jain faith merged with artisanal embroidery handiwork of zardozi and kalabutan to create rectangular pieces of textile that would form the backdrop of a Jain shrine. Such works, often commissioned by the faithful to be gifted to living saints, or donated to temples, were called chhods or puthias. The cloth itself used was velvet, the metal wire often pure gold or silver. The embroidery depicted anything from mythological themes like the wheel of law, the eight auspicious signs, the 14 dreams of mother Trishala, as well as pilgrimage sites. What emerged from the integration of faith and craft was nothing short of spectacular artefact. On display at the Sarita Handa Archives booth are 35 ancient Jain chhods, all of which have been painstakingly restored.

Manthan: A 42-ft long quadriptych

“Where there is faith, there are flowers. I have seen them at weddings and funerals, in temples, churches, dargahs, and gurudwaras. In Benares, which has always been close to my heart and my work, flowers embody all of life—joy and sorrow, beauty and loss, devotion and celebration—united in a timeless cycle,” said 85-year-old Manu Parekh, whose acrylic on canvas Manthan is his largest scale painting yet. The artist is no stranger to exploring newer formats, or in this case, scale. Last year, Parekh and renowned painter-wife, Madhvi Parekh, showcased a selection of their works that had been transformed into tapestries by the Chanakya School of Craft ateliers, at the Venice Biennale. In Manthan, we see his continued preoccupation with elements of divinity — “what I grew up with in a god-fearing household” — like the shivling and bright red hibiscus flowers.

I am not your Dalit: Mapping All the words of Dr. B.R Ambedkar

A score of LED panels, like those inside a Mumbai local train, hang suspended from a tall metal frame. Displayed on them, however, are all the words ever written by Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, and one of the strongest anti-caste proponents of modern India. The title of Yogesh Barve’s installation, I Am Not Your Dalit draws its inspiration from James Baldwin’s film, ‘I am not your Negro’, and in much the same vein, is a tightly wound critique of the quotidian nature of caste. The installation is put up by Mumbai gallery Art and Charlie. As the writings of Ambedkar flash across the tickers— Barve downloaded all the 19 collected volumes available online and transferred them into countless slides before showing them on the LED panel— we also get a glimpse of the work it takes to fight casteism, word after measured word. The art fair will run for another two days, but the duration of the work, if allowed to run till the end, will take 1,753 hours, 28 minutes and 44 seconds.

Surfing (After Hokusai): Using lego for deconstruction

Nearly 10 years ago, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei first used plastic lego bricks to create a series of portraits of political prisoners. In 2023, he recreated Monet’s Water Lilies using thousands of tiny lego bricks. A year later, continuing with the trend, he made works like Surfing, Child Play and Girl with Pearl (the last modeled on Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With Pearl Earring). Displayed at the booth of international contemporary art gallery, Galleria Continua, alongside his other pieces that meld pottery from the Yangshao Culture (5,000 - 3,000 BCE) glazed and wrapped in fabric, Weiwei makes the viewer question everything they thought they knew about art or painting.