Raghav Babbar wants to be the Vermeer of Gen Z

Despite his impressive educational lineage—first at Dehradun’s The Doon School and later at London’s Royal College of Arts—Raghav Babbar didn’t arrive at art through privilege or prodigy. He stumbled into it as a survival strategy. Growing up in Rohtak, he was, by his own admission, terrible at academics. “I was not good at studies at all,” recalls the 28-year-old artist, “My teachers were like, ‘You’re a tough one, you’re weird and you’re not getting the marks.’ So, the only thing I’d do is scribble outside.”

What began as escape became an obsession. By the 10th grade, he was practising with whatever was available—ballpoint pens and paper became his medium, portraits in Femina and Filmfare magazines his muse. “I didn’t do most of the things that other teenage boys like to do. I didn’t learn how to drive a car because I was always inside practising, drawing, painting.”

Barely a decade later, Babbar has achieved what takes most artists a lifetime. In 2024, he made ₹12 crore in sales, making him one of the youngest artists on the Hurun India Art List, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with 100-year-old Krishen Khanna as well as other silver-haired Modernist masters like Anish Kapoor, Arpita Singh, and Jogen Chowdhury. As the seventh top-selling Indian artist globally, Babbar is the youngest on the top 10 list, with auction prices ranging from $22,864 to $733,638.

But numbers tell only part of the story. In an art world increasingly dominated by abstraction and conceptual work, Babbar has doubled down on figurative painting—portraits and people rendered in thick, textured oils. Friends, compelled to sit for him in his Battersea studio, look more animated than they perhaps do in their live photos. Strangers—in paintings such as ‘The Coal Seller’, ‘The Migrants on Train’, ‘The Search’ and ‘Moonlight’—are arrested at their most alive and in their most natural states of being. His commitment to this unfashionable path, combined with his fusion of Western technique and Indian subject matter, marks him as a singular voice in contemporary art. 

Deeply influenced by European masters like Camille Pissarro, Johannes Vermeer and crucially Lucian Freud, and inspired as much by Indian contemporary artists like Atul Dodiya, Babbar’s paintings are characterised by tactile layers of paint built up over weeks, if not months, with faces that bear the marks of constant revision—scraped, repainted, glazed, and worked until they achieve what he calls “soul”. He explains, “With portraits, it’s very internal and intimate. I don’t care about technique when I’m painting portraits. It begins with scribbles, you do a childlike drawing, and then you just start doing the eyes, then you apply that texture.” 

It is that relentless search for soul that led Babbar to this year’s Kumbh Mela. Earlier this month, his first monographic exhibition in India, Mela, which documents his experience at Prayagraj, was on display at Nature Morte, Mumbai.

Armed with little else but a Fujifilm X100F camera, jostling alongside an estimated 60 million pilgrims, Babbar watched and witnessed one of the biggest gatherings of human beings and, in his series of works, chronicled a single day spent at the confluence, from sunrise to twilight, capturing the boatmen, devotees, families, and crowds in the sacred waters. What emerges is not a religious document but a profoundly humanistic one. “I believe Kumbh is more about people… It’s about those millions who came there, who made it happen.” 

Babbar, whose Kumbh Mela series was most recently showing at Frieze London as part of a Nature Morte group show, alongside Indian art’s contemporary masters like Subodh Gupta, Reena Saini Kallat, and Bharti Kher, was particularly struck by the absence of social boundaries at the Kumbh Mela.

At Har ki Pauri in Rishikesh, where bathing continues after dark, he captured bodies illuminated by floodlights against pitch-black water—deliberately exaggerating the darkness and colour saturation, removing background elements to create dramatic spotlighting effects.

The Mumbai exhibition also included his preparatory works on paper—rough sketches and gouache studies that reveal his decision-making process. “I want to share that knowledge, I want to share that confidence with people, and I want to break out of that stigma of not showing what you practice,” he says, “which can also allow other artists, and other young artists, to come and say, okay, that guy is doing something, experimenting and showing. I can also do that.”

Babbar’s own moment of conviction in doing what he does came in 2019, when he travelled to see Lucian Freud’s self-portrait exhibition at the Royal Academy. After graduating from The Doon School, Babbar spent five years at art school in Singapore, where he could not find the encouragement he sought for his interest in figurative painting. Looking at Freud’s work “changed my life”, he says. “I think that convinced me that I can do what I am really bound to do.”

He eventually landed at the Royal College of Arts in London for a MFA, despite being initially rejected by Mumbai’s Sir JJ College of Arts on a technicality about degree length. After finishing his Master’s, he set up a studio in London, where he now maintains a monastic routine: “Life is studio-home-studio-home. That’s it.” 

His dedication is so complete that he lives in clothes that are perpetually splattered with paint and has occasionally been mistaken as homeless. “If I wasn’t selling these works, I would still be painting,” he says. “All I need money for is high-quality material. What I really want is for everyone, from a billionaire to a beggar, to understand this art.”