Visiting India Art Fair on the heels of Art Basel Qatar made the latter feel, in hindsight, as though it had failed to deliver on its original promise—leaning too heavily on the comfort cushion of international blue-chip galleries at its main venue and relegating regional discoveries to a peripheral role, despite emphasizing the importance of the region. In contrast, visiting India Art Fair is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility—acknowledging how much you don’t yet know, offering a broad enough view of a vibrant scene and being willing to learn. From there, one is carried into an ecosystem that is both remarkably dynamic and genuinely welcoming, eager to share just how much is happening on the ground. One quickly learns that, despite its internal complexities, India’s art scene is now so self-reliant that, at least from a market perspective, it no longer needs validation from abroad...
Meanwhile, Chicago-based Soumya Netrabile was presented by Mumbai gallery Project 88 with a suite of sensorially and imaginatively engaging paintings inspired by years spent exploring natural habitats—forests, rivers, mountains and gardens. Her biomorphic, lush abstraction emerges from a practice that treats the body as a full perceptual instrument, resulting in synesthetic compositions that engage touch, smell, sound and even taste as tools for memory, exchange and emotional transmission. Rather than romanticizing nature, the works become a cathartic means of processing and embracing the instability of contemporary life, while reconnecting with the eternal rhythm of the natural world—something still deeply embedded in her home country’s cultural memory. Presented in a well-balanced booth introducing emerging voices from India and its diaspora, including Trupti Patel and Mahesh Balinga, Netrabile’s works likely represented the most internationally positioned in the selection, priced between $20,000 and $38,000. They sold on the first day to local collectors.
