This wasn’t meant to be another white-box gallery with spotlights screaming for attention. The idea was quieter: a space that feels like stepping into a very considered home. One that reveres Indian craft, slows you down, and lets the artworks breathe without ever fighting them for attention.
Sabyasachi’s world is all layered textures, muted opulence, and stories in every thread. Asian Paints brought the mastery of colour and surface. We were handed the part no one sees until it’s wrong: the light. The brief was short and exacting which was to make it soft, make it even, make it feel like late-afternoon sun filtered through old linen. Nothing clinical, nothing theatrical.
We wrapped the main gallery halls in our Stretch ceilings that disappear into the architecture. Underneath, carefully calibrated LEDs deliver a perfectly diffused wash. No glare on frames, no harsh shadows on sculptures, no visible fixtures pulling your eye away from the work. We tuned the colour temperature and matched the fabric tone so precisely that the ceiling reads as sky rather than surface.
Visitors tend to lower their voices without realising it. The light is so gentle that a charcoal sketch and a gold-thread textile can sit side by side and both look exactly as the artist intended. You can stand in front of a painting for ten minutes and never once squint or shift to avoid a hotspot. It feels intimate even when the room is full, like the space is holding its breath along with you.
In most galleries, lighting announces itself. Here, it does the opposite. It steps aside. When light becomes this invisible, the art finally gets the silence it deserves, and the visitor gets the rarest luxury of all. Being left alone with beauty.
