Anant Art Gallery Inaugurates Its New Space with a Landmark Exhibition

Anant Art Gallery announces the opening of its new multi-storied space in Safdarjung with The Teeming Earth, a landmark group exhibition curated by Girish Shahane.

Bringing together 26 contemporary artists, the show will be on view from Friday, 30^th January to Saturday, 14^th March 2026.

Designed by Studio Lotus, the award-winning architectural practice recognised for its attunement to context and craft, the new multi-storied gallery in Safdarjung has been purpose-built to reflect Anant’s vision for thoughtful engagement with contemporary art.

The architecture calibrates scale and intimacy, offering spaces that invite pause, encounter, and reflection. Conceived as an extension of Mamta Singhania’s vision, the gallery seeks to nurture artistic inquiry within an environment that feels both grounded in the city and open to new ways of seeing.

Drawing on a vast sweep of human and natural history, The Teeming Earth examines the intertwined destinies of humankind and the planet it inhabits. Tracing the time between when Homo sapiens began moulding ecology to the complex realities of the Anthropocene, the exhibition reflects on how human progress, fuelled by invention, agriculture and industrialisation, has both nurtured and endangered the living world.

The exhibition presents works by a careful curation of some of the most compelling contemporary Indian artistic voices, including Aditya Puthur, Abhishek Narayan Verma, Alexander Gorlizki, Anant Joshi, Atul Bhalla, Arti Vijay Kadam, Atul Dodiya, Dhara Mehrotra, Digbijayee Khatua, Ravi Agarwal, Tito Stanley, and Sudhir Patwardhan, whose practices intersect across material, conceptual, and emotional registers. Puthur and Verma trace the imprint of lived experience through figuration that resists sentimentality, while Gorlizki and Joshi use irony and visual distortion to reframe cultural and urban imagery. Bhalla and Agarwal engage the ecological as both subject and site, treating the environment as a participant in human histories. Kadam, Mehrotra, and Khatua work through process and matter, locating meaning in transformation and residue. Dodiya and Patwardhan revisit the historical and civic through nuanced painterly vocabularies, as Stanley’s restrained compositions distill psychological stillness. Read together, these practices form a layered conversation on perception, place, and the evolving condition of being.

“Our innate sense of empathy and beauty induce us to believe better worlds are possible and take measures big and small to bring that vision to fruition. Those same moral and aesthetic qualities spur us to value the very phenomena our presence tends to harm, and therein lies hope of some equilibrium being found with the natural world as the planet’s human population stabilises and then begins to fall. Humankind has never lived in harmony with nature, but there is a chance we will stop short of destroying it entirely and ourselves in the process,” says Girish Shahane, curator of The Teeming Earth.

The exhibition charts humanity’s shifting relationship with the natural world, moving from early dependence and coexistence to the complex negotiations of the present. Through painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the exhibition brings together artists whose works consider abundance, fragility, adaptation, and renewal. Each artwork reflects on the opposing instincts that shape human history, creation and depletion, empathy and excess, offering not closure, but recognition of the tensions that define life itself.

“Our new space in Safdarjung opens with a show that mirrors the intent of Anant’s curatorial direction,” says Mamta Singhania, Founder-Director at Anant Art Gallery. “We invite reflection on the human condition while celebrating the creative and regenerative potential that binds art and very life together.”

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With this exhibition, Anant Art Gallery reaffirms its commitment to critical, research-led curatorial practice that responds to the questions shaping contemporary experience. The Teeming Earth is both a reflection on our shared past and present, and an invitation to imagine futures grounded in coexistence.