THE ART OF EXPERIMENTING

Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal get candid with Krutika Behrawala about pushing the boundaries of contemporary art and running a gallery in the Instagram age

On Chatterjee: Cotton jersey t-shirt, technical silk jacket, cotton faille pants, canvas and clear mesh sneakers; all prices on request, Dior

On Lal: Silk dress, ₹3,50,000, gold-plated brass ring, ₹25,300, palladium-plated brass ring, ₹26,300; all Louis Vuitton. Shoes, Lal’s own.

From the glass window of Chatterjee & Lal, a gallery that sits serenely in a corner of Colaba in south Mumbai, I spot an under-construction road lined with attar shops. “This lane still retains more character than other parts of Colaba,” observes co-founder Mortimer Chatterjee, as he goes on to paint a vivid, sepia-tinted scene for me. “In the 1850s, this would have all been the sea. The ships would have moored right outside to load and unload coal and cotton from these windows,” he adds.