Nayanaa Kanodia: artist of the present-continuous

There is a painting near the entrance of Staged Realities that stopped visitors cold on opening night. A man on a bicycle loaded with a miscellany of wares — a monkey, a lantern, a parrot, a bunch of bananas — looks out of the canvas with the frank, unbothered gaze of someone used to being asked to stop and pose for a second. He obliges. And in that moment, Nayanaa Kanodia does what she has been doing for four decades: she arrests the ordinary Indian street, and its colourful inhabitants, in a moment of extraordinary flux.

The exhibition, presented by Dhoomimal Gallery and curated by Archana Khare-Ghose at the CCA, Bikaner House, brings together 47 works spanning the arc of Kanodia’s career — an accidental one for the former economist-turned-pioneer of naïve art in India. It is the Mumbai-based, self-taught artist’s return to Delhi after nearly 20 years, and arrives at a particularly resonant moment: 2026 marks 40 years since her debut show in 1986.