- Discipline Painter, photographer, creative director
- Based in Kochi
- Workshop AARTY studio and gallery, Palarivattom, Kochi
- Works with AARTY Founder & Artist
Aji Nayar
“Creativity exists everywhere, but opportunity does not. That sentence is the whole of why AARTY exists, and it is the test I put every collection through before it leaves the studio.
I paint, I photograph, and I have spent most of my working life building brands — which is to say, most of my working life getting other people’s work in front of the people who will pay for it. The two halves are not separate. A work that nobody can find is not finished.”
Aji Nayar is the founder of AARTY and the eye behind every collection it puts out. A painter, photographer, graphic designer and brand creator, he has spent more than three decades across art, design, communication and market development — including the unglamorous business of getting work in front of people who will pay for it.
AARTY came out of a straightforward observation: there is no shortage of skill in Kerala, and a great deal of shortage of routes to a market. A mural painter with a century of family technique behind him and a homemaker who has painted at a kitchen table for eleven years have the same problem, and it is not talent.
The studio exists to solve that commercially rather than charitably — by buying and selling work at prices the artists set, and by adding enough value in the studio, through curation, framing, finishing, adaptation and photography, that the result competes on quality rather than on sympathy. Every AARTY collection begins with his eye, and every collection is signed.
He works from the AARTY studio and gallery at Palarivattom, Kochi.
Currently in the collection
Previously sold
- The Charioteer · 2026 Sold
- Sun Chariot · 2026 Sold
- Parliament of Birds — Study II · 2026 Sold
- Three Conversations · 2026 Sold