Breaking Through the Noise: Top Contemporary Indian Artists to Watch in 2025
- Sutithi Ghosh
- Sep 25
- 6 min read
If you have seen contemporary Indian art pieces like ‘Recipes for Broken Hearts' by artist Subodh Gupta, you’ll wonder how can aluminium utensils, cable, wood, and kitchen appliances measure up to such an amazing installation? Yes, Indian contemporary art has evolved, making room for neo-modernist ideals in paintings, sculptures, digital art, massive installation art, and murals.
In 2025, the scenario looks more vibrant and awe-inspiring, with bold experimentation merging with global aesthetics. Some prolific contemporary Indian artists are using a rich variety of objects to communicate messages that are deeply rooted in our collective memory, to express the socio-economic and political perspective of present-day India.
In this blog, we will discuss some of the compelling voices of contemporary India, revealing groundbreaking works of artists Bharti Kher, Subodh Gupta, Tejal Shah, Jitish Kallat, and Mithu Sen — each working on the aesthetics and symbolic presence of the objects they showcase in their art, sharing intriguing narratives of contemporary art in India through their signature styles. In their own bold ways, they influence the local and global conversations on art and culture, breaking through the noise.
Bharti Kher Artworks: From Body to Bindi
Bharti Kher is a multidisciplinary artist working with installation, painting, and sculpture, blending all mediums aesthetically through a poetic essence. Born in the United Kingdom, Bharti moved to New Delhi in the 1990s. Most of her sculptures involve figurative works, while some installations draw on the power of abstraction. Bharti lets her viewers engage with them from a different perspective, stirring dialogues between the material object and the metaphysical truths as she utilizes metaphors, myths, allegory, and daily rituals in her installations.
Among her favourite symbols, she highlights the bindi, adorned by most Indian women. The bindi becomes the metaphor for decoration and allegory, representing the aesthetic and cultural dualities, merging the everyday with the sublime. She also works on glass bangles, clay figurines, masks, body casts to portray the duality of the external and internal, seeing bodies as something more than an assemblage of body parts. Bharti used body casts in her work Six Women; she had six sex workers of Kolkata pose for her for the project.
In her fibreglass work The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006), Bharti shows a vulnerable, dying female elephant with bindis dotting her whole body. Here, the elephant is also shown as a sacred Hindu symbol, used as a metaphor for India.
Her phenomenal and exploratory works have been exhibited across the globe; some are auctioned at premier institutions like Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
Tejal Shah: Myths and Mystics
A scholar at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, artist Tejal Shah works in multiple mediums, mostly concentrating on photography, video, installation, and performance art. The themes of ecological imbalance, gender and identity politics, human-nature kinship are revisited in Tejal’s works. Her creations include explorations of classical religion, popular culture, and history as she works extensively on motherhood, subversion, transgender women, and mythical references.
In her work You Too Can Touch the Moon – Yasoda with Krishna (Hijra Fantasy series), she works on transgender identities, desire for motherhood, and mythological symbolism. She substitutes the classic figures of some iconic paintings by Raja Ravi Varma with images from the transgender community to explore freedom of expression, self-perception, and more, inspired by the works of another contemporary artist Dayanita Singh.
Shah’s work also subverts Bollywood narratives, altering gender roles and perspectives. She works on themes of socio-ecological awareness in her works like Lucid Dreaming and Between the Waves, collage and digital prints that show flipped movement, water, hybrid creatures, and consciousness.
Shah’s works have been exhibited in international museums, galleries, prestigious film festivals worldwide, and remain as significant as ever in both personal and institutional collections.
Jitish Kallat Installations: In Conversation with History
For artist Jitish Kallat, working on diverse art mediums offers an understanding of the intersection of science, history, and philosophy. His works span the personal, national, and the universal realm. They are as intellectually layered as visually stunning — exploring time and mortality, sustenance, human existence, and ecological concerns.
He concentrates on the transience of objects, revisiting them with historical speeches, placing them in the contemporary context, bridging the past and the present. His use of abstract designs and representational forms invites viewers to see the everyday with the extraordinary, in the crossroads of history, to feel the magnanimous along with the minuscule, the transient with the eternal.
Kallat defines his art like this - "My art is more like a researcher's project who uses quotes rather than an essay, with each painting necessitating a bibliography."
At times, his works seem autobiographical, using self-imagery in conversation with ancestry, death, and legacy. His large-scale sculptures and installations like Epilogue feature more than 20,000 chapatis to depict the lunar cycles, representing his ancestral lifetime, where chapatis become the moon's changing phases.
His vivid visuals refer to Asian and European art traditions, merging advertising imagery with the conventional motifs to showcase an urban consumerist face.
Jitish has exhibited his creations as solo and group shows in esteemed international organizations and galleries across the world, in Berlin, Chicago, New York, Sydney, Singapore, New Delhi, and Mumbai. He is very particular about the emblematic effects of texts and titles in his creations, adding a sense of humour, as if it’s an act of copyrighting something that was never entirely his, but shared by history, cultural references, and collective efforts.
Mithu Sen: A Poetic Intervention
Mithu Sen, representing contemporary art in India, works across various mediums like drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, photography, mixed media, film, writing, and performance art. Her works, like those of her contemporaries, critique social structures, conventions, existing artistic and linguistic discourses.
Poetry is inherent in her works, for she was greatly influenced by her mother, a poet herself. Sen weaves interactive displays, merging sound, moving images, installation, and handmade paper works, combining the erotic, sublime, sadistic, and humorous perspectives on gender and identity, inviting curiosity.
Her themes involve home and hospitality, postcolonial feminism, though Sen constantly seeks intervention and resists the framework of gender identity and labeling herself as a female South Asian artist. She even questions the premise of her own works, that is the reason some of her artworks remain ongoing for years. With a tone of humour, she mocks the notions of gender, sexuality, censorship, questioning social hierarchies, and the academic foundations of art.
Subodh Gupta Sculptures: Decoding Domestic Symbols
Subodh Gupta has elevated the mundane objects like kitchen utensils, pans, aluminium pots, tiffin boxes, and more beyond their physical manifestations, exploring the inherent aesthetic and symbolic attributes, as visual signals.
He is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Indian artists, who uses his massive sculptures to address issues such as economic change, immigration, domesticity, memory, and globalization. After his marriage to Bharti Kher, he turned to sculpting more than painting. Evocative, Subodh Gupta sculptures deal with the artist’s understanding of memory, space, and the body on the same plane.
The Fearless Faces of Contemporary Artists in India to Explore in 2025
Contemporary Indian art has come a long way from postmodernism, emerging as a vibrant, eloquent, and exploratory practice that triggers questions relating to our present socio-political discourse, persistent gender biases, issues of censorship, and public engagement with contemporary art in India.
Artists who were trained in conventional mediums have shifted to diverse modes of expression, including contemporary installation and performance art, advertising, and digital media, blurring the line between fine art, craft, domestic labour, and sacred rituals.
Modern Indian artists do not shy away from portraying the commonplace objects like aluminium utensils, bindis and textiles, blending myths into visual languages that speak of a newfound identity, migration, and power. From large-scale installations, sculptures, video, graphics, photography, to provocative performances, they challenge societal norms and invite us to rethink our existence in a rapidly shifting world.
If you are intrigued to know more about such projects and exhibitions in 2025 or consider the prospect of contemporary Indian art for sale to enrich your home or private collection, explore TERAVARNA India, a rising art platform inviting bold and thought-provoking works from present-day artists.
