Founded in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is a contemporary art gallery representing established and emerging artists from around the globe. We specialize in work that is aesthetically and intellectually rigorous, infused with humanism and art historically significant. Our artists produce museum-calibre paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations with a strong emphasis on materiality. The gallery also has a robust photography program that includes some of the world’s most noted photographers. Our artists and photographers are well represented in renowned museums worldwide.

We offer art consulting, collection development, corporate collecting, curatorial and public art expertise and services. 

Sundaram opened the gallery in 2000 in SoHo, with a mission to show that some of the best and most meaningful art was being created by artists deeply engaged in cross-cultural explorations. He sought to challenge the prevailing narrative in New York at that time that Western men were making the most collectible art. He assembled a global roster of artists who crossed cultural and national boundaries, synthesizing Western visual language with forms, techniques and philosophies from Asia, the Subcontinent and the Middle East. He showed this work alongside important work by overlooked women artists from the New York School. His global and inclusive outlook prompted him to open locations in Hong Kong in 2008 and in Singapore in 2012. He opened a permanent space in the London in 2023. He continues to champion artists, particularly women and those from underrepresented cultures, whose work exemplifies our interconnectedness. The gallery is renowned for its support of cultural activities—including poetry readings, book launches, music performances, and film screenings—that further its mission of East-West exchange.

In 2015, the gallery began a program of partnering with museums and cultural organizations to mount exhibitions that further our mission of intercultural dialogue. Projects include Frontiers Reimagined at the Venice Biennale, an exhibition of global art, produced with the Museo Palazzo Grimani and the Italian Ministry of Culture; the photography exhibition The World We Live In at the Ayala Museum in Manila; Sebastiao Salgado: The World Through His Eyes at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre; and Jane Lee: Red States at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

Sundaram Tagore is a Calcutta-born Oxford-educated art historian, gallerist, and an award-winning filmmaker. A descendant of the influential poet and Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, he promotes East-West dialogue through his contributions to numerous exhibitions as well as his contemporary art galleries and their multicultural and multidisciplinary events.

Before opening his own gallery, Tagore was a director at Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York. He has also advised and worked with many international organizations including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the United Nations.

A candidate for a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, Tagore also writes for numerous art publications. His feature-length articles have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, and Art India. He also lectures frequently on art, most recently at the Tällberg Forum in Sweden, Sotheby’s, the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club and Singapore Management University. He has served on the boards of The Noguchi Museum, New York, and the Asian Cultural Council.

In 2015, Tagore organized and curated Frontiers Reimagined at the 56th Venice Biennale. The exhibition brought together work by forty-four painters, sculptors, photographers and installation artists from twenty-five countries who are exploring the notion of cultural boundaries. The show, which was co-curated with art historian Dr. Marius Kwint, was mounted at the historic Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice. Attendance exceeded expectations, with a record 25,000 visitors and the show received media coverage from around the world, including articles in Art + Auction, Blouin Artinfo, The Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar and The Art Newspaper, which named Frontiers Reimagined one of the five must-see exhibitions in Venice.

Tagore’s debut film, The Poetics of Color: Natvar Bhavsar, An Artist’s Journey, premiered at the MIAAC Film Festival in New York City in 2010 and garnered several festival awards, including The Accolade, The Indie Fest, and the esteemed Singaporean National Critics Choice Readers Award for Best New Art Film Epic Documentary of the Year and Best New Director (2012). The film has been shown at venues around the world, including the Hong Kong Art Centre, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Newport Beach Film Festival and the India International Centre. 

His second film, Louis Kahn’s Tiger City, a feature-length documentary on the world-renowned architect Louis I. Kahn, debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019. This was followed by screenings at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and Indian Habitat Centre in Delhi; and the National Gallery Singapore. The film is streaming on Amazon Prime.

Tagore was born in India in 1961 and grew up traveling between Calcutta, New Delhi and the Himalayas, where he went to school. His efforts to engage others in the exchange of ideas through aesthetic means is driven by a passion for cultural dialogue and service. These values are part of the Tagore family legacy. Rabindranath Tagore worked tirelessly through his life encouraging others to break free from “narrow domestic walls,” as he put it, through social justice and a universalism that merged the best ideas of East and West. His well-known dialogues with other great thinkers of his era, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Neruda and W. B. Yeats, centered on universalism and the fundamental questions of human existence. Thanks to Sundaram’s father, Subho Tagore, one of India’s first modernist painters, a poet and a magazine publisher who was raised by Rabindranath, Sundaram was surrounded by the most interesting thinkers, writers, artists, journalists and musicians of the day. 

Tagore completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States and pursued a D.Phil. in modern history at the University of Oxford. His academic pursuits—focusing on Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, American architect Louis Kahn’s work in Bangladesh, and Indian artists’ response to European modernism—cemented his passion for cross-cultural exchange and it was in this spirit that he opened his galleries.

Sundaram Tagore in the Press

LUX Magazine, CNN Talk Asia, South China Morning Post, Financial Times, China Daily, Introspective Magazine, L'Officiel, Blouin Artinfo, Blouin Art + Auction, Ocula, Artsy, South China Morning Post Magazine, HK Magazine, Robb Report, Sette: Magazine del Corriere della Sera, Singapore Tatler, Art Asia Pacific, Sunday Morning Post, Gafencu, Ming Pao​, Apple Daily, Art Collection + Design, Capital