Paresh Maity

Paresh Maity was born in 1965 in Tamluk, in the Purba Medinipur district of West Bengal. By his own account, and in press coverage of his career, he left home as a young man to pursue art against his family's wishes, training first at the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata, where he earned a BFA around 1990, and then at the College of Art in New Delhi, where he completed an MFA around 1992, reportedly graduating at the top of his class.

Maity works across watercolour, oil, acrylic, mixed media, sculpture, installation, and photography, and is most closely associated with vividly coloured watercolour landscapes rooted in his travels through India and abroad. He lives and works in New Delhi and is married to the artist Jayasri Burman. His public profile grew through a long run of solo exhibitions, more than seventy over roughly thirty five years, staged in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, alongside group shows in cities including London, Tokyo, and Paris. Among his best-known public commissions is The Indian Odyssey, a mural cited as roughly 800 to 850 feet long at Terminal 3 of Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, described by several outlets as one of the longest paintings in India.

He received the Padma Shri from the Government of India in 2014, and has continued to exhibit actively into 2026, including a presence at the India Art Fair and a new solo show, Luminous Terrains, presented by Art Alive Gallery at Bikaner House in New Delhi. As of this writing he is a living, actively working artist based in New Delhi.

Maity's critical reception runs largely through Indian art press, gallery-published essays, and institutional programming rather than international art-critical journals. The recurring frame is a painter of place and journey: watercolours and oils built from travel, riverscapes, and Indian light, exhibited at scale in retrospectives such as Infinite Light, a touring survey covering roughly thirty five years of work staged jointly by Art Alive Gallery, Art Musings, CIMA, and Gallery Sumukha across Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bengaluru. His inclusion in the collections of the British Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art, and Rashtrapati Bhavan, together with the Padma Shri and the Terminal 3 mural commission, are consistently cited as the core markers of his standing. No verbatim, attributed critical quotation from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed in the available research, so none is reproduced here.

The best-documented public sale for Paresh Maity is Dandi March, reported to have sold for USD 270,000 at Artiana in Dubai on 20 December 2023, a figure cited by market-data aggregators as his record price at auction. This figure comes from a single price-aggregation source rather than a primary auction house catalogue entry that Masterworks Academy could independently confirm, so it should be treated as the best available public data point rather than an audited record. His broader auction footprint runs mainly through Indian houses such as AstaGuru, alongside occasional international sales, with reported results well below the Dandi March figure. His primary market runs through a network of Indian galleries rather than a single exclusive dealer: Art Alive Gallery in New Delhi has presented his recent shows, and current gallery pages also list him with Aakriti Art Gallery, Art Exposure, and CIMA in Kolkata. No source reviewed states an exclusive representation arrangement.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Paresh Maity, and authentication in practice runs through his network of representing galleries rather than through a scholarly board or foundation. His exact date of birth (beyond the year 1965) is not documented in the sources reviewed, and his headline auction price of USD 270,000 for Dandi March rests on a single market-data aggregator rather than a confirmed primary auction record, so collectors should treat it as indicative rather than definitive. His market is comparatively thin and India-centric relative to his institutional profile, which means provenance, gallery paperwork, and confirmation through one of his longstanding dealers matter more than they would for an artist with a fuller, internationally audited sale history.