A little over 100 kilometres from Jaipur, Rajasthan, along the Jaipur-Jodhpur National Highway, Kishangarh is an industrial town also known as the 'marble capital of India'. Founded in 1609 by Raja Kishan Singh, the Marwar prince of Jodhpur, the region has been a centre of marble craft and trade for centuries. In fact, the pearlescent white marble used to build the Taj Mahal, which gives the Mughal monument its iconic lustre, was sourced from the nearby Makrana quarries. Last week, I visited Kishangarh at the invitation of Stonex to attend the inaugural Stonex Art Soirée — a four-day-long symposium held from March 6 to 9 which saw the luxury marble maker's Kishangarh refinery transform into a confluence of artists, designers, and creators such as Kota Kinutani, Sudarshan Shetty, Peter Randall-Page, and others from India and abroad.

Since 2001, Stonex has been at the forefront of art patronage in India, supporting art festivals and events across the country like the India Art Fair, the Madras Art Weekend, the Serendipity Arts Festival, Ibtida - Ek Mehfil, and The Homegrown Festival. The 2025 Stonex Art Soirée was the culmination of the group's commitment to the seven forms of fine art — sculpture, music, dance, cinema, literature, painting, and architecture — and a celebration of the potential of marble as more than a raw material.

"We have always believed that stone, by itself, is an art form because when we got into this business and started talking to geologists across the globe, they described stone in a very beautiful fashion, almost like an artist describing a work of art," Sushant Pathak, CMO of the Stonex group, told me. "They'd tell us this particular stone is 1.5 million years old, or it came from the pre-Jurassic period, or this particular stone is only found at the intersection of the river and the ocean."

"These were very compelling stories," Mr Pathak said. "But we also realised that people in the country don't see stones the way we see stone. We wanted to change that narrative, so we entered the art space because we thought art was the best way to do that."

The Art Soirée was an extension of the group's long-term commitment to the arts and showcased 10 sculptures by both emerging and established artists such as Sudarshan Shetty, Shanthamani Muddaiah, Gigi Scaria, Harsha Durugadda, Chandrashekhar Koteshwar, Shaik Azgharali, Yogesh Ramakrishna, and others. These sculptures were commissioned by Stonex and was made by the artists in close-collaboration with Kishangarh's traditional marble artisans, many of whom have been involved in the trade for multiple generations, as part of the Stonex Artist Residency held in 2024.

"We started conversations with artists almost two years ago," Mr Pathak said. "We spoke to a lot of artists and we presented a philosophy to them, but very few were able to resonate with what we believe in because the idea was not just to work with any artist. The idea was to work with artists who all equally believed in the ethos of elevating the value of stone, who did not see stone just as a material but had the same emotion that we have as a brand."

The sculptures will be on permanent display at the Stonex Museum (currently under construction) when it opens to the public later this year or early next year, Prachi Bhattacharya, CEO of Stonex Art, told me.

During my whirlwind visit to Kishangarh, however, the sculptures were on display at the labyrinthine stone-yard of Stonex's sprawling refinery, internally known as 'the maze'. Placed against massive, monolithic blocks of marble shipped from quarries in Greece, Macedonia, Italy, Turkey, and the rest of the world, the sculptures were a study in contrast — their almost malleable forms a stark departure from the rigidity of the stone.

As I entered the maze as part of a guided tour of the refinery, the first sculpture I came across was Bengaluru-based artist Shanthamani Muddaiah's 'Bloom'. Inspired by the silk-weaving tradition of Karnataka, Muddhaiah's home state, and the urban gardens of Bengaluru, the sculpture was made from a single block of Pantheon Peach marble from the ancient quarries of Macedonia. The sculpture, which resembles a mulberry tree in bloom, paid homage to the 'chiton', a pleated, long woollen garment historically worn by the ancient Greeks. The chiton arrived in India during Alexander's invasion of India in the 4th century BCE, and became a popular attire in India during the Maurya period. Muddaiah's use of Macedonian marble in her sculpture is a nod to that civilisational connection, Avijeet, the usher, explained.

Mumbai-based contemporary artist Sudarshan Shetty's 'Umbrella' was another highlight among the other sculptures which included pieces by artists Gigi Scaria, Harsha Durugadda, Chandrashekhar Koteshwar, Shaik Azgharali, Yogesh Ramakrishna, Harmeet Rattan, Teja Gavankar, and Magesh Ramachandran. A two-part composite sculpture (the only one of its kind among the ten), Shetty's 'Umbrella' — made from Turkish marble — is a satirical commentary about human-object relationships and the futility of social contracts. Unable to fulfil its purpose of protecting one from rain, Shetty's umbrella lies submerged in a watery grave marked by a stela which tells the story of a man who borrowed an umbrella from his mother.

"Some 10-15 years ago, I started writing these lines that could be read as short stories to side-step the language of the objects that I may have gathered to let the words dictate the objects that come," Shetty said.

"This is one of those texts," Shetty told me. "It called for an umbrella, and how do you represent it? What is the value of an object? How does it become permanent? What is the relationship between words and the image in that sense? That is something I was looking at when they [Stonex] asked me to make a piece with stone, and it went very well."

Beyond the construction of the Museum and a permanent artist residency where artists from across the world would come together and collaborate with each other, Stonex also announced the group's commitment to sustainability at the event. Currently, almost 70% of the refinery's energy requirements come from solar power, and the water used at the facility is recycled thrice across different systems and utilities. But Stonex is trying to make the facility more sustainable with recent advancements in technologies.

"We are working with our German and Italian partners to develop technology wherein even the waste material of marble, the raw material which comes out after polishing the stone, could be used to make a painting surface from the stone dust," Mr Pathak said. "Our R&D teams have been working with our German and Italian partners for the past one and a half years to see how we can bring that technology to India, and three to four months down the line we will have it in India."

The Art Soirée was only the beginning. "The next big thing is going to be the Art & Design district when it opens later this year or early next year," Mr Pathak said. "We'll also open the Artist Residency where artists from across the world will come. It's going to be a collaborative process on a global scale."

As I left Kishangarh and headed home the next morning, I thought about the sheer scale and scope of what Stonex is trying to do in Kishangarh. When we think about corporate patronage of art, we often think about how widely art is misappropriated and co-opted by Capital to hide its many misadventures. But there's something larger at play in Kishangarh — something that goes beyond the usual prestige, politics, and pleasure that drives art patronage. The people at Stonex — the executives, the workers, the artisans — seem to know this and take pride in the work they do. The artists, too, are keenly aware of the mandate of their commission to restore the legacy of stone — not just as a material, but as a medium of expression and human ingenuity. Their works speak to the contemporary crises and existential questions of the world through the enduring and timeless medium of stone. I cannot wait to see the culmination of this vision, and I know I'll be back to see the museum when it opens to the public next year.

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