India Art Fair 2026 is gearing up for the biggest edition in its history, bringing together 123 exhibitors at the NSIC Exhibition Grounds in New Delhi from February 5 – 8, 2026. Regional and International art galleries, institutions and design studios, including a number of first-time exhibitors, will present works from artists whose practice runs the gamut of medium and subject matter. As the capital city is filled with outdoor installations, live performances, talks, activations and parallel exhibitions, visiting the fair can seem like a marathon. Our curated list of must-see exhibitions helps you navigate the frenzy.

India Art Fair 2026: 193 Gallery, DMINTI, Vadehra Gallery, David Zwirner and more

193 Gallery, which has locations in Paris, Venice and Saint-Tropez, presents the works of Kenyan visual artist Thandiwe Muriu, who is inspired by African textile culture, oral traditions and everyday life to create distinctive, surreal photographic works. New York-based cultural agency DMINTI will showcase American feminist artist Judy Chicago’s large-scale installation What If Women Ruled The World? The outdoor work is a physical/digital quilt of ideas and responses by artists and communities around the world to Chicago’s titular question and the work needed to arrive at gender equality and inclusive communities. Meanwhile, the host city’s Vadehra Gallery presents the work of over 20 South Asian artists in a polyphony of voices and ideas that address issues like climate change, urbanisation, the construction of nations and borders and reimagining archives and mythology. The booth will feature works by artists including Atul Dodiya, Jai Chuhan, Hylozoic/Desires, Shilpa Gupta and more. Acclaimed international gallery David Zwirner will bring sculptures and paintings by artists like Yayoi Kusama into conversation with works by artists like Marcel Dzama, known for his fantastical compositions, Suzan Frecon’s pared-back abstract works and Huma Bhabha’s expressive multimedia sculptures.

BMW x India Art Fair – A Giant Sampler

The winner of BMW India and IAF’s 2026 The Future is Born of Art commission, Goa-based multimedia artist Afrah Shafiq, will present a large-scale public art installation titled A Giant Sampler. The work is inspired by embroidery samplers and the visual language, motifs and practices of an art form that is inextricably tied to women’s history, everyday reality and inclusion in the art world. Shafiq weaves together references that stretch from the modern day all the way back to the 1500s, drawing motifs from the ancient and contemporary fabric art of East and South Asia, the Americas and the Middle East to create a bricolage of traditions that culminates in a digital tapestry displayed on the fair’s façade. The work also has an interactive element—an augmented reality feature that allows visitors to scan the artwork to learn more about embroidery and its forms around the world. Shafiq’s practice merges ancient handiwork traditions and folklore with modern technology, code and new media art to create points of connection for contemporary audiences.

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art – Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being)

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Tyeb Mehta Foundation and Saffronart Foundation, will be exhibiting over 120 works by Tyeb Mehta, one of India’s most renowned modernist artists, to mark his birth centenary. The exhibition will feature paintings, drawings, sculptures, film and archival material, making it the first comprehensive retrospective on Mehta, curated by Roobina Karode. Conflict, suffering and the human condition are frequent themes in Mehta’s work, influenced by his experiences witnessing life in post-Independence India and during the partition. These are seen in iconic series like Falling Figure, Falling Bird, Bull and Diagonal, which will be shown alongside the Mahishasura and Kali series, which engage with mythology and folklore. Also on view is his short film Koodal (1970) (Tamil for ‘meeting place’), which reflects on image synthesis, juxtaposition and human coexistence. Rounding out the exhibition, archival material including early studies and drawings, the artist’s notebooks, photographs and exhibition materials provide a rare insight into Mehta's process and life.

‘Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being)’ will be on view from February 5 – June 30, 2026, at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

Goa-based collective HH Art Spaces brings their signature live performance art to IAF 2026 with a ‘conceptual cooking’ performance in an open-air kitchen. The programme brings together three artists from different backgrounds and disciplines, fusing dance, sound art, spoken word and experimental music. Japanese artist Yuko Kaseki, French artist Uriel Barthélémi and Indian artist Suman Sridhar, a.k.a Black Mamba, come together in a potluck of ideas exploring ‘feeding’ beyond food—as a ritual and mode of connection. Kaseki embodies ‘the outsider’ through her dancework inspired by ‘Butoh’, an avant-garde dance form from postwar Japan. Musician and composer Barthélémi explores the physicality of sound, drawing on his genre-bending practice characterised by improvisation. Meanwhile, Sridhar, whose music has been classified as ‘worldbeat’ for its cosmopolitan character, brings a collage of sound spanning cinema scores, jazz, Indian classical and opera. The overlaps, synchronicities and synthesis between these artists created in real time during the performance form a temporal space for those looking for community, presence and comfort. 

‘Breakfast in a Blizzard’ will be on view from February 5 – 7, 2026, at India Art Fair 2026.

Saat Saath Arts Foundation – Conjectures on a Paper Sky

The Saat Saath Arts Foundation will host a solo exhibition of works by Indian visual artist Jitish Kallat titled Conjectures on a Paper Sky at Bikaner House in Delhi. The Mumbai-based artist blends science, cosmology, mathematics, abstraction and modern political thought to create artworks that seek to investigate and experiment. For Kallat, art is a mode of inquiry, a research method that he mobilises to investigate the systems that govern the world. The exhibition follows Kallat over a decade of creation, including works from influential series like Integer Studies (2021), which consists of 365 drawings visualising the passage of time, made daily, using population data to drive his shapemaking. Curated by Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York, the exhibition traces the evolution of Kallat’s distinctive method, rituals and visual language that allow him to vacillate between extremes of scale, method and subject matter.

‘Conjectures on a Paper Sky’ will be on view from February 4 – 10, 2026, at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Bikaner House, Delhi.

STIR Gallery - Portrait of an Artist

Following the launch of Indian photographer Rohit Chawla’s book Portrait of an Artist (2026) at this year’s edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival, STIR Gallery in Delhi will host an exhibition highlighting works from this decade-long project. The book features intimate, behind-the-scenes looks at 60 of India’s most influential contemporary artists and their studios, including M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, Mithu Sen and more. Chawla’s compositions are spare, monochromatic, shot in natural light; they reject artifice to bring humanity and emotion to the fore. The camera becomes Chawla’s key to enter these intensely personal spaces, capturing moments of calm, restlessness, playfulness and melancholy in unguarded portraits. Portrait of an Artist is an important addition to the work of cataloguing India’s art history as it unfolds, while standing as an iconic artwork in its own right.

Also at STIR: Disobedient Objects: The Biography of Clothes, a group exhibition curated by Sreyansi Singh, in association with Fashion Design Council of India for Young Collectors’ Programme; Remember Her Name 2.0, developed by Anitha N. Reddy and presented in collaboration with Kadari Art Gallery, highlighting the Siddi women quilters of Karnataka; and two outdoor pavilions—The Streets of Conversation by SJK Architects and Pavilion of Conversations by Bose Krishnamachari, both first showcased at ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2026.

India Art Fair 2026 will take place from February 5 – 8, 2026, at NSIC Exhibition Grounds in Okhla, New Delhi.