Top 10 Most Important Indian Contemporary Artists

In this article, we turn our attention to India, identifying ten of the most important Indian artists working today across various forms and disciplines. Instead of creating a subjective list based on the author’s personal preferences or experiences, this list is the result of a research-based methodology drawn on the analytical tools provided by ArtFacts. Of course, no algorithm can fully capture the cultural richness or nuanced impact of an artist’s practice, especially in a country as diverse as India. Yet by grounding this selection in career data, we aim to present a representative and current cross-section of Indian artists who have achieved sustained influence both locally and internationally. What that influence means—culturally, politically, or artistically—is ultimately for the reader to explore.

10. Amar Kanwar

Amar Kanwar (born 1964 in New Delhi, where he still resides and works) employs film, sound, text, and multi-screen installations to explore how power, violence, and justice influence everyday life. Starting from first-hand research in regions marked by political conflict—across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar—he builds slow, layered narratives that combine eyewitness testimony, archival documents, poetry, and lush images of landscape. This merging of fact and metaphor creates a window through which to experience history not only as information, but also as emotion and moral choice. Parallel to his exhibitions, he collaborates with grassroots organisations and universities, treating art as a catalyst for public dialogue about human rights and ecological responsibility.

Since the late 1990s Kanwar’s installations have appeared in nearly every major forum for contemporary art. He is one of the few artists to be invited to four consecutive editions of Documenta in Kassel (2002, 2007, 2012, 2017) and has presented large solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Bildmuseet, Umeå; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Biennials in Sharjah, Kochi-Muziris, Istanbul, Sydney, and Venice have likewise featured his work, which often expands across multiple rooms in immersive constellations of screens, suspended texts, and archival objects. Kanwar’s sustained engagement with social justice has been recognised by the MacArthur Fellowship in India (2000), the Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art (2005), Creative Time’s Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change (2014), the Prince Claus Award (2017), and the IHME Helsinki Commission (2022).¹

9. Reena Saini Kallat

Reena Saini Kallat (born 1973, Delhi) lives and works in Mumbai, where she builds a wide-ranging practice that moves between drawing, sculpture, photography, and video. Her point of departure is the way political borders cut through land, communities, and ecosystems—an echo of the Indian Partition that reshaped her own family history. Twisted electric cables that mimic barbed wire, bureaucratic rubber-stamp imprints, and hybrid creatures spliced from species found on either side of a frontier all appear in her work. Kallat often mines archives of migration, vanished people and contested natural resources, then re-inscribes those absences in the public imagination. Lists of the “missing” are painstakingly stamped onto paper; constitutional promises of freedom and equality are rewoven into wall-sized drawings; national emblems morph into cross-pollinated flora and fauna that challenge one-sided narratives of belonging. Through these acts she balances tension with optimism, suggesting that imaginative empathy can loosen even the toughest boundary.

Her work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Thun (2023), Compton Verney and Firstsite in the UK (2022), Norrtälje Konsthall, Sweden (2021) and the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques–Guimet, Paris (2020). Major biennials—from Sharjah (2023) and Bangkok (2020) to Havana (2019) and Busan (2016)—have featured her installations, while earlier projects appeared at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale (2011) and the Göteborg International Biennial (2011). Museums that hold her work include MoMA New York, Tate Modern, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum Arnhem, Manchester Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Sharjah Art Foundation, among many others. Across these settings Kallat returns to a core conviction: that remembering, questioning and re-imagining our shared past is a practical act of hope. “Isolation is never complete,” she notes; “wherever two worlds meet, something new can grow.”²

8. Rina Banerjee

Rina Banerjee (born 1963, Kolkata) lives and works in Brooklyn and channels a life shaped by constant movement—India, the UK, and, since childhood, New York—into exuberant sculptures, drawings, and paintings. Everyday objects, colonial souvenirs, delicate textiles, shells, spices, Murano glass, and industrial fittings mingle in her installations, where they sprout into fantastical creatures or fragile architectures. By stitching together materials and myths from many geographies, Banerjee probes how migration, trade, climate disruption, and lingering colonial power shape ideas of home, femininity, and “otherness.” Banerjee’s drawings echo this hybridity. Rendered in inks that bleed and bloom like living organisms, they borrow the precision of Indian miniature painting, the lyric line of Chinese silk scrolls, and the symbolic intensity of Aztec codices. Figures morph into flora and fauna, borders dissolve, and titles extend into novel-length musings.

Over the past decade, Banerjee’s reputation has expanded worldwide. Make Me a Summary of the World, her travelling retrospective (2018–20), spanned the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, San José Museum of Art, Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, and Frist Art Museum, Nashville. She has appeared in more than a dozen international biennials, including Venice (2013, 2017), Yokohama, and Kochi-Muziris, and has mounted solo projects at Musée Guimet, Paris, and the Frist Art Museum. Her work now belongs to collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondation Louis Vuitton, SFMOMA, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. Alongside her studio practice, Banerjee mentors the next generation of artists as a critic in Yale University’s MFA program.³

7. Jitish Kallat

Jitish Kallat (born 1974, Mumbai) moves easily between painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and video to map the ties linking the personal, the urban, and the cosmic. Atoms, rainfall charts, ancient star maps, and everyday street signs can appear side by side in his work, which treats science, philosophy, history, and mathematics as a single, interlaced vocabulary. Recurring questions of time, mortality, nourishment, and ecological balance anchor these shifting scales: the fleeting moment of a breath is set against geological epochs, the bustle of Mumbai against the stillness of deep space. Parallel to his studio practice, Kallat is an active curator.

Over three decades, Kallat has explored these ideas in museum exhibitions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Frist Art Museum, Nashville; and Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. The National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, presented Here After Here 1992–2017, a mid-career survey tracing his evolution from early figurative canvases to data-driven constellations of form and light. His work has also featured in global gatherings—from the Havana and Gwangju Biennales to the Asia Pacific Triennial, Guangzhou Triennial, and major exhibitions at Tate Modern, Serpentine Galleries, Mori Art Museum, and Somerset House.⁴

6. Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective—formed in New Delhi by Jeebesh Bagchi (b. 1965), Monica Narula (b. 1969), and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b. 1968)—moves between art, filmmaking, writing, curation, and research. Since the early 1990s, the trio has treated the studio, the street, the archive, and the screen as contiguous workspaces, pursuing what they call “kinetic contemplation”: a practice that asks audiences to pause and reconsider the things they normally rush past. Their installations, films, online projects, texts, and public encounters braid together speculative philosophy, close readings of history, and a steady interrogation of how power inscribes itself on objects, places, and people. Whether tracing the after-images of industrial modernity, staging conversations between myth and technology, or folding time “like a sheet of paper,” Raqs invites us to imagine alternative routes through the past and possible futures.

This wide-angle approach has led to exhibitions and commissions across the globe, including Coronation Park at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where orphaned plinths, plaques and fragments of statuary formed a field of uneasy monuments about the fragility of authority. In the video Provisions for Everybody (2018) the collective followed the footsteps of George Orwell from disused coal seams in northern England to an unfinished bridge in Bihar, India, opening a dialogue on empire, labour and landscape. Beyond their own artworks, Raqs have shaped discourse as curators—most visibly as artistic directors of the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016-17)—and as founders of the Sarai programme at Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a long-running platform for critical thinking about media and urban life. Throughout these varied roles, they return to a set of persistent questions: How do stories travel? Where does empire end and common life begin? And what new voyages become possible when we dare to bend the line of time itself?⁵

5. Nalini Malani

Nalini Malani (born in 1946 in Karachi, India) is widely acknowledged as a key pioneer of video art in India, yet her practice still begins with the most direct of gestures: drawing and painting. From these origins, she extends images into projected animation, film, and vast multi-screen “shadow plays” where silhouettes, moving paintings, sound, and narrative spill across walls, ceilings, and floors. The result is an engulfing theatre of light in which layered figures and voices refuse to stay still. A lifelong advocate for the artist’s role as social witness, Malani turns to stories overlooked by official histories—especially those surrounding women, the poor, and the displaced. Her own early experience as a refugee of the 1947 Partition permeates works that revisit colonial legacies, sectarian violence, and the perils of aggressive nationalism.

Malani’s commitment to collaboration and experimentation has carried her work to biennials, theatres and museums around the globe, and into the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the British Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, and India’s National Galleries of Modern Art in Mumbai and New Delhi, among many others. Whether traced in charcoal or cast in shifting shadows, her images insist on a dialogue that stretches beyond borders, mediums and sanctioned memory. By pressing inherited icons and popular myths until they fracture, she opens space for alternative, often feminist, readings of power and resistance.⁶

4. Gauri Gill

Gauri Gill (born 1970, Chandigarh) lives and works in Delhi and has spent more than twenty-five years using photography to chronicle everyday life in India’s rural and tribal communities. She approaches the camera as a tool for long-term listening. Her images focus on resilience—small acts of humour, resourcefulness, and quiet beauty that persist alongside struggles for land, education, and healthcare. Gill’s ongoing archive, Notes from the Desert, began in 1999 and now contains thousands of black-and-white photographs made in western Rajasthan. Sub-series such as The Mark on the Wall, Traces, and Balika Mela trace classrooms, gravesites, births, and village fairs, returning to the same families over the years so that the work grows out of friendship rather than reportage. Throughout, she welcomes us to “enter the frame,” collapsing the distance between photographer, subject, and spectator. Furthermore, collaboration is central to Gill’s practice. In Fields of Sight (since 2013) her photographs are over-painted by Adivasi artist Rajesh Vangad with intricate Warli drawings, blending contemporary lens-based imagery with an ancient graphic language. Beginning in 2015, Acts of Appearance brings papier-mâché mask makers of the Kokna and Warli tribes into fictional tableaux: villagers go about daily chores while wearing newly invented masks that hover between the real and the otherworldly.

Gill’s work has featured in the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), MoMA PS1 New York, the Chennai Photo Biennale, and exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2022) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2023). Her photographs belong to the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, among others. Recognition includes the Prix Pictet for photography and sustainability (2023), Canada’s Grange Prize (2011), and the Fifty Crows Award (2002). Recent publications with Edition Patrick Frey—Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023)—extend Gill’s commitment to collaborative authorship onto the printed page, shaping a body of work that continually asks how images can honour local stories while addressing universal questions of memory, mobility, and survival.⁷

3. Dayanita Singh

Dayanita Singh (born 1961, New Delhi) is a photographer, bookmaker and self-described “museum maker” who constantly rethinks how images can be organised and experienced. Beginning with hundreds of photographs shot over decades, she edits with extreme rigor, then arranges the surviving pictures into fluid sequences that can be reshuffled at will. This impulse has led to her signature mobile museums—modular structures built from hinged screens or stackable cubes that fold flat for travel, then open into pillars, rooms or table displays. Each museum—Museum of Chance (2013), Bawa Rocks (2021) and others—turns an archive into a living, conversational space where photographs are endlessly re-ordered, emphasising connection over chronology.

Singh’s mobile museums have appeared at the Hayward Gallery, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, inviting audiences to handle stools, open panels and become part of the installation. Whether documenting musicians, archives, architectural spaces or everyday rooms, her photographs remain open to perpetual rearrangement, reminding viewers that meaning is shaped by the order in which images are seen—and how easily that order can be changed.⁸

2. Shilpa Gupta

Shilpa Gupta (born 1976, Mumbai) works at the meeting point of art and social enquiry. Trained as a sculptor at Mumbai’s Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts, she now moves fluently across sculpture, video, sound, text and interactive installation to ask how visible and invisible borders—national, religious, linguistic, psychological—shape everyday life. Gupta’s pieces often position viewers as temporary “others”: a microphone invites you to recite censored verses, an automated gate judges whether you may pass, a thicket of motion-sensitive microphones whispers about surveillance the moment you approach. By transforming ordinary technologies—such as audio loops, LED signs, metal detectors, and automatic gates—into disquieting metaphors, she exposes how power is internalized and how consensus is manufactured.

Gupta has presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as Centro Botín, Santander (2024); Amant, New York and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin (2023-24); MUHKA, Antwerp (2021); Barbican Curve, London (2021); Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar (2019); YARAT, Baku; Museum Arnhem; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; and the OK Centre, Linz. She has contributed to the Venice, Berlin, Gwangju, Kochi-Muziris, Lyon and Liverpool biennials, among many others. Her work forms part of major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.⁹

1. Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor (born 1954, Mumbai) has spent more than four decades reshaping how sculpture can occupy space, light and perception. Kapoor moved to London in the mid-1970s, studying first at Hornsey College of Art and then at Chelsea School of Art. Early pigment-covered geometric shapes led to his breakthrough installation Void Field (1989), which earned him the Premio Duemila at the 44th Venice Biennale and, a year later, the Turner Prize. Since then, he has extended his material vocabulary to wax, stainless steel, alabaster, silicone, and inflated PVC, yet the conceptual core—an investigation of negative space and the sublime—remains constant. Working across scales—from handheld pigment pieces to monumental forms installed in cities—he pursues the dialogue between matter and void. Highly polished mirrors draw viewers into vertiginous hollows; stone or earthworks become seemingly bottomless wells; vast PVC membranes billow like organs turned inside-out. Throughout these transformations, he tests metaphysical opposites: interior and exterior, presence and absence, the container and the contained.

Major solo exhibitions have traced this evolution at institutions such as Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2023–24); Gallerie dell’Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin, Venice (2022); Modern Art Oxford (2021); CAFA Museum, Beijing (2019); Serralves Museum, Porto (2018); Château de Versailles (2015); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012). Kapoor’s public commissions have become modern landmarks: Cloud Gate (2004) reflects Chicago’s skyline in a seamless steel curve; Descension (2015–17) turns water into a perpetually sinking vortex in settings from Versailles to Brooklyn Bridge Park; and Ark Nova (2013), an inflatable concert hall, toured earthquake-stricken regions of Japan. Kapoor’s work belongs to collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museums in Venice, Bilbao and Abu Dhabi; Prada Foundation, Milan; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. He was appointed CBE in 2003 and knighted in 2013 for services to the visual arts, and continues to live and work between studios in London and Venice, pursuing what he calls “spaces full of what isn’t there.”¹⁰

Notes:

1. Marian Goodman Gallery, Amar Kanwar consulted June 17, 2025. Amar Kanwar, Biography consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
2. Richard Saltoun, Reena Saini Kallat consulted June 17, 2025. Reena Saini Kallat, Biography consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
3. Perrotin, Rina Banerjee consulted June 17, 2025. Rina Banerjee, About consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
4. Nature Morte, Jitish Kallat consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
5. Frith Street Gallery, Raqs Media Collective consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
6. Galerie Lelong, Nalini Malani consulted June 17, 2025. Nalini Malani, Biography consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
7. James Cohan, Gauri Gill consulted June 17, 2025. Gauri Gill, Bio consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
8. Frith Street Gallery, Dayanita Singh consulted June 17, 2025. Dayanita Singh, About consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
9. Galleria Continua, Shilpa Gupta consulted June 17, 2025. Shilpa Gupta, About consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎
10. Lisson Gallery, Anish Kapoor consulted June 17, 2025. Galleria Continua, Anish Kapoor consulted June 17, 2025. ↩︎

Cover image: Dayanita Singh, Pothi Khana, 2018. 30 hinged teak structures, 80 black and white and 20 colour archival pigment prints, 6 stools — 40.6 x 40.6 cm (each photograph, framed) 53 x 53 x 45 cm (each structure) 227.9 x 52 x 52 cm (each structure) 41.2 x 44 x 44 cm (each stool). Courtesy Frith Street Gallery.

Last Updated on June 25, 2025