Manuel Rabat\u00e9<\/a>, the former director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, was appointed in February to run the museum.<\/p>\nAccording to Nadar, the 180 works on display in London this summer will be \u201cjust a glimpse of the depth of the collection,\u201d covering 60 Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi artists working from the 1950s to the present day. She describes it as \u201ca slice of our own exhibition history\u201d, featuring five distinct curatorial strands. One, for example, will feature Nalini Malani, the subject of the KNMA-backed collateral exhibition at this year\u2019s Venice Biennale. <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/a760f880b7ca25f95574f74ee325a3a0782f4ce3-1404x1419.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Anwar Jalal Shemza, Square Composition 2 (1963)
Image courtesy of the artist and KNMA<\/p>\n
Other strands will focus on Indian tribal art, which Nadar says has “never been shown in the way that it deserves to”, and the mid-20th Modernists who were \u201ca key part of the development of the culture of India in the post-British era\u201d and are now most highly sought after on the international art market. <\/p>\n
Nadar is keen for the exhibition\u2014and her museum\u2014to showcase the links that exist across national boundaries in the unbounded cultural sphere of post-colonial South Asia. \u201cWe have [Anwar Jalal] Shemza in this show, we have Sadequain, we have Zainul [Abedin],\u201d she says, referring to Pakistani and Bangladeshi artists who worked at the same time as Indian Modernists like Francis Newton Souza, Sayyed Haider Raza, and Maqbool Fida Hussain. \u201cIndia is part of a wider South Asia\u201d, Nadar says. \u201cThese artists were constantly in touch with each other\u2014artists were not subject to the same conflicts that apply to borders and governments.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Nadar, the exhibition is \u201ca statement that this shared history exists, that it is rich, complex, and unresolved\u201d, and, now, \u201cat a time of increasing geopolitical division, it feels especially important to present those exchanges”. The 20th century, she says, was a \u201cbetter time\u201d for those links: \u201cI still collect Pakistani artists\u201d, she says, although, with geopolitical a matter of fevered domestic controversy in India, \u201cI am being a little careful,\u201d she acknowledges. \u201cI don\u2019t want to get into conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Christie\u2019s exhibition is one of a series of international and institutional collaborations that KNMA is planning in the period before the new museum site opens. Nadar is exploring opportunities for further exhibitions at major Western museums, while gathering archival material to facilitate greater under of a branch of global art that is still comparatively under-researched. Nadar is gathering photographic and documentary material from the families and estates of artists like Hussain and the late photographer Raghu Rai, to open a “digitised resource that will be free to access”.<\/p>\n
And, as one of the largest buyers in the history of the Indian art market\u2014and someone in large part responsible for the boom in prices<\/a>\u2014she is entering a new phase as a collector. \u201cI\u2019m going to be more discriminating,\u201d she tells The Art Newspaper. \u201cI need to focus on filling the gaps in the story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi will take over Christie\u2019s London headquarters in St James’s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":812792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32],"tags":[9530,648,1032,149505,68158,1033,171,194612,330197,330198,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-812791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art-market","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-auction-houses","tag-christies","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-indian-art","tag-kiran-nadar-museum-of-art","tag-south-asian-art","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116614013413061579","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}