Raghav Babbar

Raghav Babbar was born in Rohtak, India, in 1997, though some published profiles give 1998, a discrepancy that has not been resolved in his public biography. He studied at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore before beginning a graduate degree in painting at the Royal College of Art in London around 2022, variously described as an MA or an MFA. He now lives and works in London.

Babbar paints everyday South Asian subjects in oil, often working from a cinematic, film-still-like sense of composition and light. Coal sellers, domestic workers, and other ordinary figures recur in his portraits, which are widely described as observational and quietly dignifying rather than documentary. His London debut, A Visual Journey, opened at Waterhouse & Dodd in 2021. Since then he has shown at Nahmad Projects in London, Larsen Warner in Stockholm, Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Los Angeles, and Nature Morte in New Delhi, alongside institutional presentations at ICA Miami, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, and CICA Vancouver.

Coverage of Babbar in outlets including Artsy, Whitewall, and HENI has consistently framed him as one of the youngest and most closely watched painters to emerge from India's contemporary scene, praised for pairing observational portraiture of ordinary South Asian life with a cinematic, film-still sense of composition. No verbatim critical assessment attributed to a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; the available material is primarily gallery, institutional, and interview text rather than independent criticism.

Babbar's auction history began in 2021, when Memory is a Permanent Luxury sold for about USD 318,000 at Sotheby's first live sale in Singapore. Prices rose quickly: Surinder brought over USD 450,000 at Phillips London in October 2022, and Off Duty brought nearly USD 650,000 (HKD 5,040,000) at Phillips Hong Kong that December, reported at the time as a new auction record for the artist. A 2024 Forbes profile lists a higher price, USD 733,528, for a work titled The Coal Seller, but does not state the auction house or sale date, so that figure cannot be confirmed as the current record. In 2024, on reported sales of roughly INR 12 crore, Babbar was ranked seventh among top-selling Indian artists globally on the Hurun India Art List, the youngest artist in that list's top ten.

Babbar has no catalogue raisonne and, given that his auction market only opened in 2021, is unlikely to for some time. His public sale history is short, on the order of fifteen to twenty lots across Sotheby's and Phillips per market aggregators, so results have moved quickly and can vary widely from one sale to the next; his own reported birth year shifts between 1997 and 1998 depending on the source, a reminder of how recent and unsettled his public biography still is. His gallery relationships, with Nature Morte in New Delhi and Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Los Angeles among the most consistently documented, are the best current source for verifying a work, and the institutional acquisitions listed on his own site, including ICA Miami, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, K11 Hong Kong, and the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, have not been independently verified against each institution's own collection database.