Robert Nava's Cat Dragon Goes to Art Mumbai

Robert Nava's "Cat Dragon" is headed to Art Mumbai with Night Gallery, and the painting shows what kind of gallery Night Gallery wants to be at its first art fair in India. The 2021 canvas measures 72 by 82 inches (182.9 by 208.3 centimeters), it is made of acrylic and grease pencil, and it goes to a fair that runs 12 to 15 November 2026 at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse. Nava has spent 2026 carrying his creatures from Tokyo to the Peter Marino Art Foundation to Chicago, so Mumbai is one more stop on a circuit, not a detour.

Seventy Two by Eighty Two Inches of Ochre

Cat Dragon is a hybrid animal painted on a roughly worked ochre ground. The head is black, the eye is full of flame, the teeth are jagged, and the body is green and red, with blue looping lines wrapping the figure. Acrylic carries the color and grease pencil carries the line, a pairing Nava favors for its speed and immediacy.

The painting breathes fire and still looks like it came out of the margins of a school notebook. That is the joke and the menace together. Nava takes the conventions of heroic monster imagery, the scale and the frontal pose, and fills them with the wobble of a hand that was not slowing down to correct itself. At almost six feet by seven, the canvas is large enough that the notebook doodle reads as a full figure.

Cat Dragon was made in 2021, a year before his "Bloodsport" show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, which ran 19 February to 26 March 2022. The gallery has represented him since 2019, the year it announced Han Bing, Robert Nava and Brie Ruais together and showed Nava in a 2019 exhibition titled "Vs."

Night Gallery Joins Perrotin and Richard Saltoun as a Debutant

Night Gallery is one of the international galleries making a first appearance at an art fair in India through Art Mumbai. The fair's organizers name it with Perrotin, Richard Saltoun Gallery, Rizq Art Gallery and Niru Ratnam, and a separate release adds Rajiv Menon Contemporary to the debut list, which accounts for six in all.

Art Mumbai's fourth edition has 94 exhibitors, 73 of them Indian galleries and 21 international. Lisson Gallery and Galleria Continua are among the international names returning. One ticketing listing starts public hours on Friday 13 November, while the fair's releases give 12 November as the opening day.

Perrotin comes to Mumbai after its October presentation in Paris, where Perrotin Panorama put Jeppe Hein and Josh Sperling first. Night Gallery shares the debut list with a Paris based gallery with a global program, and a Nava creature is its introduction.

Tokyo in February, Chicago on Home Ground

Nava's 2026 started in Asia. His first Tokyo solo show, "Supercharger," ran at Pace Gallery Tokyo from 19 February to 1 April and gathered new paintings and works on paper made between 2023 and 2026. It was his first solo exhibition in Japan, and Mumbai makes his second Asian stage of the year, this time with the gallery that has represented him since 2019.

The Peter Marino Art Foundation opened a Nava show on 21 May with ten large scale paintings of mythical creatures, dragons and animals. Night Gallery also took new Nava work to EXPO Chicago, Booth 209, a presentation framed as a homecoming. Nava was born in 1985 in East Chicago, Indiana, and earned a BFA in fine art from Indiana University in 2008 before an MFA in painting at Yale.

The sequence runs from a Pace gallery in Tokyo to a foundation to the hometown fair, and Mumbai is a new stop for the same creatures. A 2021 painting is a clean introduction there, because one canvas carries the whole vocabulary: the cat and the dragon, the notebook and the monster, the joke and the threat.

Painted Fast, Built to Be Read Fast

Nava began by drawing characters from cartoons and cereal boxes as a child in East Chicago, and Cat Dragon keeps that logic of the quick, readable figure. A fair rewards paintings that read fast, and a flame in the eye, a row of jagged teeth and a green and red body read at once.

The question Mumbai raises is placement. Night Gallery is putting Nava in a fair with 94 exhibitors, among Perrotin and Lisson, so the painting has to hold its own against other galleries' best. A six foot acrylic dragon with a flame in its eye is built for that kind of contest.

Art Mumbai closes on Sunday 15 November, so Cat Dragon has four days at Mahalaxmi Racecourse.