Tao Art Gallery Celebrating 25 Years

"The motivation behind the genesis of any institution becomes clearer when one takes a look at its journey over the years. Tao Art Gallery originated in the year 2000 from a seed of pure, undiluted passion, and from that energy grew a space of art that was intimate yet expansive. For my mother, Kalpana Shah, starting the gallery was just a means to get closer to the one thing she craved more than all else – creativity. The mesmerizing world of art spoke to her soul – to the creator and connoisseur within her. So what better way to honour this than surrounding oneself with it? This free-spirited quest was what brought her closer to the Modern Masters, active and thriving at the time, who guided her further on her journey. Showing the ‘way to art’, as indicated by the tagline she chose for the gallery, was exciting but in no way an easy feat!
 
The growth of Tao therefore is an enigma and an unwavering tribute to the power of passion. The passion of its founding team, its first artists, its encouraging patrons and, most importantly, its appreciative audiences. Despite the trials and tribulations brought by life with the financial crisis of 2008 coinciding with the tragic loss of her husband, my father, Pankaj Shah, she was able to see the gallery through with a rare breed of mental resilience. Her boundless energy, she found, had never been tied to people or the external world around her, but instead to her own inner ability to divine optimism in all things.

In the past few years since I have joined the gallery in my own capacity, I have tried hard to understand and carve out exactly what Tao stands for as it rightfully continues building its brand on the Indian art landscape. I have found, however, that there is no one answer, no particular box or shelf with a tag line that the gallery comes under. It is the limitless pursuit of creativity that fundamentally adds to its dexterous ability to fluidly move through time and spaces. After all, it is only the creative people of the world who have the courage to live with ambiguity. Tao’s power lies in its ability to adapt, to re-learn with humility and to support without discrimination.
 
As we reach this milestone year, our anniversary exhibition celebrates not just the past, which has been an invaluable foundation, but also the present, with our new and young contemporary artists, and our future, filled with the potential of all of the perspectives being explored in an ever expanding industry. Art today is more multi-faceted than it has ever been. The ‘ways of engagement’ are now even more interwoven within artistic practices and audience expectations. As a gallery we hope to continuously experiment with what we view as art and give a platform to eclectic and curious thinkers who boldly move forward with innovative ideas. The concept of self now cannot be separated from the art we create and view. So we hope to facilitate conversations around art as a preserver of culture and identity, art as therapy and a means of introspection, art transcending mediums and surpassing boundaries both tangible and intangible. The future, I believe, will no longer have a linear movement between Modern and Contemporary, or a separate existence of mediums like sculpture, painting or performance, but rather all will merge and thrive parallelly, in a world where multiple universes can and will exist. 

Finally, I hope to continue what my mother once started, not with a sense of pure business or opportunity, but rather with a very large beating heart that never ceases to amaze and be amazed. While being a gallery that showcases art, the essence of Tao itself is a work of art, meticulously and instinctively created over twenty-five years, and as Cezanne beautifully puts it, A work of art that did not begin in emotion is not art." 

Text Sanjana Shah 
 

Ranjit Hoskote’s Curatorial Essay for Gateways & Pathways (2025)

"I. The Biblical psalmist may well have sung that “a thousand years are as yesterday when it is passed”, but a quarter of a century – although seemingly a far briefer span of time – can yet be momentous, memorable, and viscerally present to those who have lived through it; to those who carry the chronicles of their experience of that period with them as dreams, hopes, fears and aspirations.
 
Today, as we celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the foundation of the Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai, we recognise how impressively a quarter of a century can imprint itself on human history. Especially when we speak of the years between 2000 and 2025, which have been marked – both globally and in India – by sweeping tides of hope and of despair; by radiant optimism as well as tragic tumult; by a grand belief in the redemption of our planetary future, which has been all but abandoned before an all-consuming grief at humankind’s apparent obsession with destroying its own environment and all its fellow creatures.
 
Within the parentheses set by these extremes of feeling and circumstance, artists working across the spectrum of creative expression everywhere have continued to produce their paintings, books, films, sculptures, plays, installations, musical and choreographic compositions, architecture, textiles, as well as dynamic assemblages developed at the intersection of these forms in the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total art work’. In other words, there has been no lack of ambition and audacity among contemporary artists, in addressing the urgencies of their time.
 
Correspondingly, in this inaugural quarter of the 21^st century, galleries committed to supporting the visual arts have necessarily had to take on the mandate of meeting the new challenges that seismic changes in society, the economy and the polity have posed to the aesthetic sensibility and the creative domain at large.
 
Galleries, as much as artists, have had to contend with insistent questions, such as: What kind of formal choices and symbolic languages can now bridge the gap between art and its audience, in an epoch saturated with digitally available information and the spectral reality of the internet? What can the traditional avenues of patronage – connoisseurship, acquisition, the formation of collections, the cultivation of an environment of discussion – mean, when the artistic project can articulate itself beyond the traditional art object, in ephemeral ways, through performance or dialogue with a community, or in the elusive borderlands between the physical and the digital? How can artists meaningfully ally themselves with activists and commentators who address the raging political storms of the time; how can they manage the tensions that come into play when one is simultaneously a producer in a cultural economy and a participant in the wider crises of citizenship, representation and freedom?

II. This is not, of course, the first time that creativity has had to contend with such universal chaos. After all, we have created and supported art through global wars, natural and political catastrophes, revolutions, and tyrannies – each time, it must be emphasised, such resistance has often come at a grievous price, paid in the currency of repression, prohibition, exile, and even death.
 
Historically, one of the strategies of a vibrant art gallery – especially in periods of ambient upheaval – has been to align itself with a particular cohort or phalanx of artists, committing itself to their aesthetic world-view or artistic ideology. I have no quarrel with this approach: the relative narrowness of its focus is often compensated for by the intensity of its outcomes in the form of exhibitions, manifestos and debates.
 
However, another and equally fruitful strategy has been available, historically, to an art gallery that is responsive to its time, place and predicament. It could choose to embrace a plurality of artistic positions, ranging across generations, styles, media and locations; in so doing, it bears witness to the art world in its actual efflorescence, rather than to the art world as it is prescriptively regulated and idealised. Such an art gallery may not announce itself through manifestos or add its name to debates; the rhythms and patterns of its evolution may emerge most clearly in retrospect.

It is this latter strategy that Tao has adopted. And, as we review its journey in its 25^th year, the outcomes of this strategy become evident in the plenitude of artistic choices to which it has played cradle, crucible and platform.

III. A gallery for the visual arts must act as a hub for artists and lovers of art; a hive for processes of generative dialogue; and a haven for practice of making as well as of interpretation. At the core of this exhibition, organized to celebrate the Tao Art Gallery’s 25^th anniversary, lies precisely such a hospitable ethos, which Tao has created and sustained. Founded by Kalpana Shah, its onward journey is now steered by Kalpana with her daughter Sanjana; they have nurtured a responsiveness to artistic creativity that extends itself across the conventional boundaries of style, genre, medium and generation. Through this inter-generational way of working, Tao has presented the work both of established figures as well as emergent practices in the art world – which is why this celebratory exhibition is titled Gateways and Pathways.
 
The Tao Art Gallery has provided its viewers with gateways into the canonical history of the art world as well as with pathways forward into evolving and as-yet unpredictable futures. And these routes have not been mutually exclusive: within Tao’s ambit, venerable maestros of the modernist horizon have recreated themselves startlingly in experimental mode on occasion, while young artists have presented their improvisations while maintaining a vigorous dialogue with their modernist predecessors.
 
Since a considerable number of artists will be brought together to form this exhibition, it will act as a festival of varied artistic itineraries, an assembly of diverse voices. Among these artists are those who have been closely associated with the gallery, as well as those who have been friends of the gallery and shown there occasionally, either in solo presentations or group shows.

IV. All we have asked of the artists invited to participate in this exhibition is that they should be intensely themselves. And we have composed their works as a dance of impulses and possibilities, a dialogue between remarkable affinities and dramatic paradoxes, across a most significant exhibition space: the historic Jehangir Art Gallery, endowed by the legendary 20^th-century patron of culture, Sir Cowasji Jehangir, and designed by the young and brilliant architect Durga Shankar Bajpai. The first major public space for contemporary art in India at the time, the Jehangir Art Gallery opened its doors to the public in 1952; it celebrates the 73^rd year of its inauguration this year.
 
Integral to the narrative of Gateways and Pathways is the trajectory of the Tao Art Gallery as it has charted the period between the late 1990s and the present – a phase in India’s art history that has borne witness to a decisive shift away from the dominance of a few major painters and sculptors, and towards the diffusion of a wide range of practitioners, many of whom straddle the domains of art, popular culture, activism, and various subcultures, while also exploring the formal and conceptual possibilities of multiple media. In charting this trajectory, accordingly, Gateways and Pathways proposes a flow of shifting timelines, marked by the interplay of legacy and improvisation.

V. I have written, elsewhere, that Tao acts as an oasis. On entering the gallery, the viewer retreats from the turbulence of the outside world and is received into a space of repose. I must point out that this repose is not to be confused with complacency; rather, it is a state of mind in which the faculties of response and appreciation are allowed full play. Kalpana and Sanjana Shah do not wish us to abdicate our connection to the outside world. Both of them are keenly aware of the strife and horror of our time, and of the forces that reduce humankind to puppets and victims.
 
Importantly, the example of Tao’s founding family reminds us that the oasis must not be seen as a hideout or place of escape. Rather, it is a pause that prepares us to deal with the surrounding desert; a reminder of the blessings of abundance that must regenerate lands given over to aridity and barrenness. For this gallery’s history has been indelibly marked by the violence that has marred the last quarter century. The tragic passing of Pankaj—Kalpana’s husband and Sanjana’s father—during the 26 November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, left its impress on their lives forever. No words of consolation can have been adequate in the face of such loss; the best memorial to such loss is the way in which the family – including Kalpana and Pankaj’s son Sarjan – came together to confront and overcome the act of fate with which they had been faced. In demonstrating such inspiring courage and fortitude, the family has dedicated itself to the values that Pankaj embodied.
 
Even as she has navigated Tao through the years, Kalpana articulated herself in the various commitments of being a wife, a mother, a gallerist, an artist in her own right, and a contributor to the fields of entrepreneurship and industry. In turn, Sanjana has come into her own as a daughter and a writer; she inherits a legacy of love for the arts, and participates in a youthful cultural scene, seeking out fresh talent, often in unexpected zones of inspiration.

VI. Within the oasis that is Tao, we breathe more deeply, and find ourselves renewed. Gateways and Pathways relays this sensation of renewal to a larger public. In this exhibition – whether we gaze on new maps for the precariously self-amplifying metropolis, or self-portraits that have been crafted from anxiety and exaltation; whether we are intrigued by works that shuttle between history painting and streetside graffiti, or are fascinated by affirmations of archetypal power, or seek to decipher scintillating montages shaped from contradictory energies – we find ourselves invited into expansive spaces of the imagination that lie beyond the narrow and defensive house of the individual self.
 
The artists who have been convened to form the fabric of Gateways and Pathways include the cerebral and the intuitive; they variously investigate the sensuous intimations of materiality; they conduct an archaeology of the self as well as of such constructs as identity, neighbourhood, and belonging; they re-enchant the shifting frontier between abstraction and representation. Such are the thresholds of potential transformation to which Gateways and Pathways offers kaleidoscopic testimony.
 
As an adventure in creativity, Tao offers us a salutary lesson in responsiveness and inclusiveness. This is perhaps best glossed in the words of that great teacher in whom a sublime creativity and a razor-sharp critical awareness were so beautifully twinned: J Krishnamurti. In the passage from a talk that he gave more than half a century ago at Ojai, California – and which serves the present essay as an epigraph – Krishnamurti observed, “A living mind is a free mind, learning… never coming to any conclusion, and that is the beauty of this whole movement of life.”

Text Ranjit Hoskote 
Date 19-09-2025