On a crisp fall evening in Chelsea, in New York City, the Sundaram Tagore Gallery filled with a familiar hum: artists, collectors, curators, and longtime patrons gathered beneath a constellation of Hiroshi Senju’s luminous waterfall paintings to celebrate a milestone.
The latest exhibition, part of a year-long anniversary program titled “25 Years: A Global Conversation,” opened its New York chapter with the kind of warmth that felt less like an art-world event and more like a homecoming.
Across the white walls, works by artists, from across continents -many of whom began their journeys with the gallery decades ago conversed across borders and sensibilities, exploring identity, migration, technology and the shared human impulse to create.
Standing among them, I was transported to my first meeting with Sundaram Tagore when he established his namesake gallery in SoHo 25 years ago. Few New York spaces focused on artists exploring cross-cultural identity. “We opened with a simple mission,” Tagore said. “To create a salon where cultures could meet on equal footing through art.” Now, standing here, I thought of the years of sustained effort to widen these horizons. A vision fulfilled.
Tagore has never been the archetypal art dealer — there’s no spectacle, no theatrics. Instead, he projects a dignified, soft, well-mannered exterior that hints at his lineage of art aristocracy. A curator and art historian by training, Tagore entered the gallery world with a vision shaped not by market trends but by lived experience.
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Born in Kolkata to a family steeped in artistic and intellectual legacy, he grew up surrounded by painters, poets and thinkers who believed art was a conduit for dialogue. After all, his great-uncle was Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, philosopher and Nobel laureate. His father, Subho Tagore, was a painter and poet, editing art magazines.
That lineage shaped him, but Tagore is the first to insist that the gallery’s focus stands on its own. After studying art history at Oxford, Sundaram began working at Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York, curating exhibitions that explored connections between Eastern and Western art traditions. In 2000, that vision came alive as the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Soho where we first met.
As the gallery grew, so did its footprint. A Hong Kong outpost opened in 2005, followed by Beverly Hills in 2008, and later successful expansions in Singapore and London. Rather than expanding for scale, Tagore positioned the galleries as cultural nodes, each fostering its own community of artists, writers and thinkers, and emphasized the work of women artists who had historically been overshadowed in the Western canon.
Sundaram championed such famous artists such Hiroshi Senju (Japan), Natwar Bhavsar (India/US), Golnaz Fathi (Iran), Miya Ando (US/Japan), Sohan Qadri (India/Denmark) and Jane Lee (Singapore).
The 25th-anniversary initiative reflects both the gallery’s history and momentum. The anniversary is not a retrospective, but a continuum. Tagore wanted to show how ideas travel, change and return in new forms.
Beyond his role as a gallerist, Tagore has been actively involved in curating and organizing exhibitions that promote cross-cultural understanding, like Frontiers Reimagined at the 56th Venice Biennale. In recognition of his efforts, Sundaram has served on the boards of several esteemed institutions, including The Noguchi Museum and the Asian Cultural Council.
Colleagues describe Tagore as a quiet but persistent force. “He helped expand the art world’s mental map, he was making the case for equivalence — showing that artistic excellence exists everywhere, not only in the West.”
Beyond curating, Tagore has ventured into filmmaking. “The Poetics of Color: Natwar Bhavsar,” “An artists Journey illuminated the life of the Indian American painter and, in 2019, Louis Kahn’s Tiger City. His upcoming film Art Matters with Nandita Das and Linus Roache delves into the subject of how art affects society.
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His global perspective extends beyond exhibitions and films. New York is the flagship, Singapore signifies the Asia Pacific presence, and the soon-to-be-opened London gallery at 27 Pall Mall extends the European reach. Each houses a branch of the gallery, each a node in Tagore’s network of cross-cultural exchange. But in London in 2026, Tagore plans to emphasize his South Asian heritage and promote the best of Indian Art.
A quarter century after its inception, the Sundaram Tagore Gallery remains anchored by an idea that has only grown more urgent: that art is at its most powerful when it brings worlds together. The bridges Tagore built now feel not only relevant, but necessary.
As London prepares to welcome his signature diplomacy of culture, one senses something quietly profound, a shift not driven by spectacle, but through the soft power of artistic resonance. India’s most powerful ambassadors are no longer from technology or banking. India’s cultural voice — textured, confident, self-assured — is stepping onto the global stage as an equal. In Tagore’s hands, cultural exchange becomes not commerce, but calling. In that calling, a nation finds one of its most compelling ambassadors.
(Jaswant Lalwaniis a global real estate advisor and lifestyle consultant in New York City. He is also an avid writer and globetrotter. To read more of his work visit www.jlalwani.com)