India Art Fair 2026 and the New Language of Contemporary Practice in India

5–8 February 2026 | NSIC Exhibition Grounds, Okhla, New Delhi
Iram Art – Booth E-04

India Art Fair has matured into far more than a commercial rendezvous. It now functions as a cultural index, revealing how artists across generations are rethinking material, memory, and meaning in a moment shaped by global circulation and local inheritance. At IAF 2026, the most compelling presentations resist spectacle in favour of coherence. They reward time. They ask questions rather than announce answers.

Among these, Iram Art's fourth consecutive appearance stands out for its editorial clarity. Following a critically appreciated showing at Art Mumbai, the gallery brings a focused roster to New Delhi, anchored by five artists whose practices traverse ritual, psychology, migration, geometry, and intimacy. Expanding the lens beyond a single booth, this selection is placed in dialogue with senior figures whose work continues to shape the larger conversation at the fair.

The result is not a list, but a constellation.

Dinar Sultana

Ancestral Rhythm and Feminine Cosmology

Dinar Sultana's large-scale papier-mâché panels form the conceptual heart of this year's presentation. Working with self-made paper derived from newspaper pulp, clay, minerals, charcoal, and graphite, she incorporates direct impressions from bamboo craft traditions, allowing material to function as memory.

Her imagery, drawn from archetypes of the primordial mother-goddess, positions the female body as both origin and landscape. Rhythm is her organising principle - not decorative repetition, but the pulse of ancestral knowledge carried through stitch, soil, and breath. Measuring six by six feet and priced at ?24,00,000, her 2026 works feel less like images and more like terrains of belief.

Promiti Hossain

The Inner World as Material Tension

Promiti Hossain's Midnight Series from Dusk to Dawn turns inward, mapping psychological spaces that exist in quiet friction with outward identity. Building on her earlier Mimesis of the Mind, her work draws from Aristotle's notion of art as revelation rather than replication.

Through gouache, acrylic, embroidery, and etched acrylic sheets, Hossain incorporates what she describes as "invisible labour" - scratches and abrasions that mirror internal resistance. Her recent shift from paper to canvas marks a deliberate departure from the familiar, reinforcing risk as a necessary condition of emotional inquiry in visual art. Faded Memories of Winter (2025), priced at ?2,90,000, captures this synthesis of memory, dream, and emotional residue with restraint.

Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Migration, Motherhood, and the Feminine Archive

Sangeeta Sandrasegar's practice unfolds as a long-form meditation on migration, homeland, and inherited memory. Using pierced and cut paper dyed in Indian indigo, she draws upon domestic craft traditions historically associated with women, transforming needlework into a vehicle for political and personal storytelling.

Her installation On the Field of Truth on the Battlefield of Life IV comprises 105 illuminated wall-mounted figures referencing the Mahabharata, alongside paper cut forms rooted in family history, life in Australia, and recent experiences of motherhood. The delicacy of her process amplifies, rather than diminishes, the conceptual weight of the work.

Rakesh Patel

Geometry as a Living Cipher

Rakesh Patel's practice spans paper, wood, and steel, unfolding as a continuum in which the diagram becomes relief, and relief becomes monument. His yantra-like drawings operate as intimate codes, while his sculptural works expand these geometries into architectural propositions.

In corten steel, Patel's forms take on civic presence - part shrine, part ruin, part machine. Architectural Maze – 2 (2026), priced at ?12,50,000, exemplifies his belief that geometry is not a relic of the sacred past, but a living language capable of holding spiritual, architectural, and social meaning simultaneously.

Narayan Sinha

Intimacy, Precision, and Pause

Narayan Sinha's brass sculptures are defined by restraint. Working at a human scale, his forms privilege proportion, surface tension, and tactility over gesture. Intimità Personale – Litografia (2025), priced at ?2,25,000, rewards prolonged viewing, offering a moment of stillness within the visual density of the fair.

In an environment often dominated by immediacy, Sinha's work insists on slowness as a form of engagement.

Expanding the Frame: Voices That Deepen the Conversation

To understand the full breadth of India Art Fair 2026, it is essential to widen the frame beyond a single gallery presentation.

G Ravinder Reddy

Reddy's monumental figurative sculptures confront constructions of femininity, power, and spectacle. Drawing from temple iconography, popular culture, and political imagery, his work interrogates how devotion and authority are shaped, displayed, and consumed in public life.

Arpita Singh

A foundational figure in Indian contemporary art, Singh's narrative paintings weave personal memory with political unease. Her layered compositions continue to resonate for their ability to hold vulnerability and critique within a single pictorial space.

Ranbir Kaleka

Kaleka's cinematic installations and paintings collapse time, movement, and memory into immersive experience. Working between painting, video, and sound, his practice extends the language of Indian modernism into a contemporary vocabulary, time-based and technologically engaged.

A Fair That Rewards Attention

What ultimately distinguishes India Art Fair 2026 is not scale, but intentionality. The artists highlighted here engage with history without nostalgia, material without fetish, and identity without reduction. Together, they suggest an ecosystem confident enough to slow down, excavate, and speak across multiple registers at once.

At Iram Art, Booth E-04, and across the wider fair, this is contemporary practice at its most assured - not chasing relevance, but quietly shaping it. In an art market increasingly defined by commercial velocity and auction house dynamics, these artists remind us that depth and sustainability remain essential to lasting cultural impact.