David Adjaye has reportedly designed his “most advanced museum concept” yet for India’s biggest private collector, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi, which is set to open in 2026.
According to the Art Newspaper, the museum will honour India’s multiple cultures and religions at a time of heightened nationalist politics.
The architect’s vision for the new museum honours India’s multiple cultures and religions at a time of heightened nationalist politics.
In 2011, the Indian collector Kiran Nadar stepped in to fund her country’s inaugural pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, in the near absence of state support for the show. At the time, her idea for creating a generation-defining museum in Delhi was inchoate, but ambitious. “I didn’t yet know what shape it would take, but I wanted to make a mark,” she tells The Art Newspaper.
True to her vision, last month Nadar returned to Venice for the city’s 18th Architecture Biennale (until 26 November) to unveil designs for what promises to be India’s largest private art museum project of this century. She was joined by David Adjaye, the prominent Ghanaian-British architect who, in 2019, was selected to design her building.
It will be India’s national modern and contemporary art museum, for all intents and purposes.
The museum is due to open in 2026, near Delhi’s Indira Gandhi international airport. It will be “India’s national modern and contemporary art museum, for all intents and purposes”, said Glenn Lowry, the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, during a live conversation with Adjaye at the unveiling of the building’s designs at the Biennale. “India’s institutions have not lived up to the scale and potential of its arts,” Lowry said. “The KNMA takes on the role as a symbol for what is now possible.”
Nadar is, by many accounts, the biggest private collector and patron of Indian Modern and contemporary art today. She has acted as something of a beacon for the nation’s art world since she opened her first museum in 2010, in Delhi’s nearby city of Noida, with a collection of around 500 works.
