A journey through modern Indian art, told through the works of 101 masters. Indian Masters brings together the works of 100 significant artists to trace the development of modern Indian art from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Presented in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the exhibition brings an extraordinary gathering of modern Indian art to Patna. Moving from academic realism and the Bengal School to the Progressives, modernists and contemporary artists, the exhibition reveals that Indian modernism was never a single, linear movement. It emerged through many voices and many ways of seeing; shaped by colonialism and nationalism, Independence and Partition, tradition and experimentation, as well as profound social and cultural change. Across painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking and other media, artists continually returned to questions of identity, memory, the body, landscape, society and the nation. Traditions were recovered and reinvented, new visual languages emerged, and boundaries between the indigenous and the international were repeatedly reimagined. Indian Masters invites visitors to encounter more than a century of artistic experimentation and discover the many histories, ideas and voices that have shaped modern Indian art.

X Mithila paintings. A journey across continents, and a return home. As Mithila painting gained recognition beyond Bihar, its distinctive visual language began to draw the attention of collectors across the world. In the 1980s, four American friends began collecting these works, each building an individual collection that carried the art of Mithila far beyond the region of its origin. Decades later, one of these collections has returned to Bihar. The Timeless Art of Mithila brings together X paintings from this collection, offering visitors an opportunity to encounter works that travelled across continents before finding their way back to the place where their journey began. Together, the paintings reflect the richness and enduring character of Mithila’s artistic tradition, while also tracing a remarkable story of movement, collecting and return. The exhibition marks the homecoming of a collection that has spent decades away from Bihar.