An airport is often the first and last impression a traveller carries of a place. It’s where a journey truly begins and where it quietly ends, somewhere between security lines and boarding calls. For years, that in-between space was defined by little more than glass, steel, and anonymity. That’s changing. Across India, airports are commissioning working artists at a national scale, softening the sterility of transit with colour, craft, and story, and in the process, giving contemporary Indian art an audience that most galleries could never reach.
Every mural or sculpture placed in a terminal introduces millions of travellers to a region’s heritage before they’ve even stepped outside. Amid the rush of queues and gate changes, art offers the eye somewhere calm to rest, a deliberate pause built into the churn of transit. The right piece, positioned near a gate or a departures hall, often becomes the one lasting image a traveller associates with an entire trip. Here’s a look at some of the works turning India’s busiest airports into unexpected cultural landmarks.
Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport
At Terminal 2’s departures hall, a mural by Nawal Kishore greets travellers with the words that inspired it: “Art now welcomes every journey.” Born in 1977 in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, Kishore earned both a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in painting from Lucknow College of Arts & Crafts, and later worked on a Lalit Kala Akademi research grant at Delhi’s Garhi Studio in 2001–02. His mural, rendered in warm reds, radiant yellows, and deep blues, captures humanity’s bond with nature, transforming a corridor built for queues and boarding calls into a brief moment of colour and stillness.
Terminal 3 holds several of the airport’s most ambitious commissions. Jaipur-based designer Ayush Kasliwal conceived and fabricated the Canyon Wall, a 240-metre installation featuring nine giant sculptures of hand gestures drawn from Indian classical dance and yoga. Mounted on 675 hand-spun copper discs and built with the help of over 400 craftsmen, it’s one of the largest public art works in any Indian airport.
Nearby hangs Walled City, a 21 x 8.2 ft mural by Padma Shri awardee Anjolie Ela Menon, one of India’s most celebrated modern artists. It took six months to complete and depicts the sights of Old Delhi: Chandni Chowk, the Clock Tower, cinema halls, kites, and street animals. Menon, long known for her public-space work, has described large-scale murals as a race against age.
Terminal 3 also houses the Surya Namaskar Installation, commissioned by Delhi International Airport Ltd. and positioned beside the Mudra Wall. Rendered in steel, aluminium, and fibreglass, it depicts all twelve postures of the Sun Salutation, a tribute to yoga as one of India’s most recognised wellness traditions worldwide. Close by, a life-size Mother Elephant & Calf sculpture group, made by Indian sculptors, brings warmth and naturalism to the domestic departures zone, offering an intimate counterpoint to the monumental scale of the Mudra Wall.
Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport
At Terminal 2, A Story of Flight rises 20 feet into the air. Created by New Delhi-born, Chennai-based artist Parvathi Nayar for the terminal’s 2014 opening ceremony, the drawn sculpture reflects her signature approach: scaling intimate, hand-drawn work into architectural form. It remains one of the tallest single installations in the terminal.
Also at Terminal 2 stands the Statue of Prosperity, a 108-foot bronze by Padma Bhushan sculptor Ram V. Sutar, best known for creating the Statue of Unity. Cast in steel and bronze with a brass coating, it depicts Kempe Gowda I, the founder of Bengaluru, and serves as the terminal’s monumental gateway landmark.
Elsewhere at Mumbai’s airport is V+mana, a bronze sculpture by artist LN Tallur measuring 13.2 x 5.5 ft. Built to evoke adbhuta rasa, or wonder, one of the nine classical emotions in Indian aesthetic theory, it blends the form of a traditional temple gopura with the silhouette of a rocket launcher. The title plays on the word “Vimana,” rooted more in architecture and scale than in the modern idea of an aircraft, and the piece is designed to leave travellers with a quiet, curious sense of awe.
Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport
Along the boarding pier of Terminal 2’s International Departures, artist Krishnaraj Chonat’s sculpture “The Moon” is built from silicone bronze, copper, steel, and patina. Honouring Bengaluru’s ties to space and aviation, the piece shifts with the viewer’s perspective, concealing and revealing itself so that its two halves only ever unite in the mind of the person looking at it, evoking adbhuta, or wonder, much like Tallur’s work in Mumbai.
Noida International Airport
Noida’s newest terminal anchors its art programme around two works by Padma Shri painter Paresh Maity. Mystic Abode suspends over 8,000 brass bells, everyday objects of Indian devotion, into an immersive installation with a contemplative, spiritual tone. Awakening (Jagriti), a four-panel oil painting series nearly two years in the making, traces India’s sacred rivers: the Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati, and Saryu, opening at the ghats of Varanasi before moving to Sarnath, the site of the Buddha’s first sermon.
In the International Departure lounge stands a roughly 12-foot bronze Statue of the Sun God, created by artist Satish Gupta in brass and copper. Drawing on Chola-era artistic traditions, the serene, powerful figure of Surya represents the cycle of time and universal energy, a fitting reminder of India’s enduring craftsmanship for travellers about to leave the country.
What connects these works isn’t just their scale or medium, but their intent. Each was commissioned to give a transactional, fleeting space a sense of place and meaning. For the artists, these terminals offer a stage larger than most galleries could provide. For travellers, they offer something simpler: a reason to look up, if only for a moment, before the next boarding call.
