India’s rise in the global art market has been well-orchestrated, although it is perhaps less known that it was the great collector and patron Kiran Nadar who partly led the charge. It was able to appoint Manuel Rabate, the long-time director of Louvre Abu Dhabi, as director of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) ahead of the unveiling of its historic building, which spreads over an area of more than one million square feet in Delhi. Set to become India’s largest integrated cultural centre, spanning centuries and genres in both spatial and acquisitive scale, the museum will have multiple exhibition spaces, a performing arts centre, a library and archive centre, an education center and several restaurants.
In addition to opening India’s first private institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art, Nader has also been behind some recent records for Indian artists, most recently the purchase of a record-breaking 1954 large-scale MF Hussain painting. Untitled (Gram Yatra)Which was sold for $13.8 million at Christie’s auction in New York last October. On the occasion of the opening of Nalini Malani’s stunning show Of Women Born at Magazzini del Sale, an official side event to the 2026 Venice Biennale supported by KNMA, The Observer sat down with Nadar – arguably one of India’s most influential patrons of the arts – to discuss her vision and priorities.
The Nader Museum has been in the works for years, but finding the right space took time. KNMA, a non-commercial, non-profit organization supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, dates back to 2010. “It was not an immediate decision to create a museum. It has been on the annual agenda for a very long time,” she explained. “We had another space that wasn’t designed, and we had an architectural committee that decided on the architect for the project, and that was given to David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates. The work started about four years ago.”
