India’s largest private contemporary art museum

Walking through the vast artistic space of 20,000 sq. ft at a Delhi shopping mall, one gets a glorious glimpser of Indian art world’s amazing masterpieces - SH Raza’s monumental painting ‘Saurashtra’ and Jitish Kallat’s skeletal car sculpture, for example.

We must thank the KNMA that has just unveiled its new premises at DLF Place in Saket, with a grand party hosted last month. Renowned personalities from the world of art were all there to visit the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) that until now had been running out of the HCL campus in Noida.

Her husband Shiv is the founder of HCL with a rich business background. The official website mentions: "At a time when India had a total of just 250 computers, Mr. Nadar led a young team that passionately believed in and bet on the growth of the IT industry. That vision in 1976, born out of a Delhi "barsaati", akin to a garage start-up, has resulted 3 decades later in a $5.5 billion global transformational technology enterprise today. From designing India's first PC at the same time as global IT peers in 1978; to working on the Boeing Dreamliner's Flight Management Systems now, HCL has stayed a true Pioneer of Modern Computing."

The business tycoon has already committed to put aside over 10 percent (his own net worth is estimated at a whopping Rs 15,000 crore) of his fortune for different philanthropic ventures. These comprise building free schools, running universities and also a museum of art. His philanthropic projects will entail an expenditure of around Rs 4,000 crore in the next five years with focus on a proposed Shiv Nadar University, free residential schools, and of course, an art museum.

Already, Kiran Nadar’s ambitious private venture is probably the largest showcase of contemporary & modern art in India. It well goes to show how one individual collector’s showpieces can make for an ambitious repository of contemporary art easily accessible to all art lovers.