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Power 100

Most influential people in 2025 in the contemporary artworld

18

Kiran Nadar

Funder - Indian collector supporting South Asian art and its history

18 in 2025

  • 202518
  • 202470
  • 201799
  • 2016
  • 2015
  • 2014
  • 2013
  • 2012
  • 2011
  • 2010
  • 2009
  • 2008
  • 2007
Courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Art, Nadar says, is a ‘tangible interpretation of shared cultures and traditions’, and as the wife of tech billionaire Shiv Nadar, she has the means to help facilitate that sharing. With the vast David Adjaye-designed Kiran Nadar Museum of Art still a year off completion, she continues to loan works from her impressive collection of (largely Indian) art and to operate her museum out of a Delhi mall. There, housed between other global brands, you might have caught Caravaggio’s 1606 Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, recently shown with the help of the Italian Embassy. It’s Indian and South Asian art, however, for which Nadar is the real ambassador, with a collection of 14,000 modern and contemporary artworks, to which she added M.F. Husain’s largescale 1954 painting Untitled (Gram Yatra), bought in New York for $13.8m. Nadar’s museum has been forging partnerships with MoMA, the Met, Pompidou, Tate, London’s Barbican and Qatar Museums, where KNMA’s hybrid Husain immersive show (first presented in Venice last year) made a stop, while a 190-work-strong retrospective of artist and poet Gulammohammed Sheikh was staged back in Delhi.

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