New Delhi: Anupam Poddar had a living room once.These days the sofa is shoved into a corner, and the rest of the big square space is taken up by a life-size model of an antique cream-coloured Jaguar with a giant mechanical dinosaur mounting it from behind. On the dining table sits a row of exquisitely delicate sculptures made of human bone and red velvet. A video installation has found a home above a bathroom tub.
For Poddar, 34, buying art long ago stopped being a question of what to hang on which wall. Installations, many of them large and provocative, squeezed themselves into each room, across the garden, in the driveway and in every lavatory.
“It just took over my life. I had to throw out most of my furniture,” Poddar confessed. “It became an obsession. The term hobby is too tame. It almost controls you.”
Proud owners: Anupam Poddar and mother, Lekha Poddar, stand next to an installation made by an Indian artist at their house in New Delhi. The two are among the leading collectors of contemporary art from India. Photograph: Tomas Munita / NYT
The private obsession Poddar shares with his mother, Lekha, who lives downstairs, is about to become a public boon. What they have collected separately and together over the last 30 years will be exhibited in a new space in the suburb of Gurgaon, what will be, in effect, India’s first contemporary art museum.
Spread over two floors and 7,500 sq. ft in an office tower, the Devi Art Foundation, as it is called, is due to open on Saturday, with an inaugural show of photography and video called Still Moving Image. It features the work of 25 artists, a fraction of the roughly 2,000 contemporary pieces that make up Poddar’s collection, along with an estimated 5,000 folk and tribal pieces, which are his mother’s passion.
India is bursting with commercial art galleries, but Devi is poised to be what the Poddars’ home has been for many years: a non-commercial, nonprofit exhibition space for contemporary art from India and the subcontinent. Yamini Mehta, director of modern and contemporary Indian art at Christie’s auction house in London, described it as “a truly ground-breaking first for India.”
In a way, Devi (www.deviartfoundation.org) is the natural next step for a country awash with new wealth, soaring art prices and a prolific crop of artists and collectors. Think of it as India’s turn to do what the US did in the early 20th century, when wealthy patrons came together to give birth to some of the most important American cultural institutions. India is not there yet, cautions Vishakha N. Desai, the India-born president of Asia Society in New York, but perhaps heading in that direction.
“I would very much hope that like-minded people will come together to build larger civic institutions that go beyond any individual collector or founder,” Desai said in an e-mail message.