By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI - Anupam Poddar had a living room once.
These days the sofa is shoved into a corner, and the rest of the space is taken up by a life-size model of an antique creamcolored Jaguar with a giant mechanical dinosaur mounting it from behind. On the dining table sits a row of exquisitely delicate sculptures made of human bone and red velvet. A video installation has found a home above a bathroom tub.
For Mr. Poddar, 34, buying art long ago stopped being a question of what to hang on which wall. Installations, many of them large and provocative, squeezed themselves into each room, across the garden, in the driveway and in every lavatory. “It just took over my life. I had to throw out most of my furniture,” Mr. Poddar confessed. “It became an obsession .”
The private obsession Mr. Poddar shares with his mother, Lekha, who lives downstairs, is about to become a public boon. What they have collected separately and together over the last 30 years is being exhibited in a new space in the suburb of Gurgaon, becoming, in effect, India’s first contemporary art museum.
Spread over two floors and 700 square meters in an office tower, the Devi Art Foundation, as it is called, opened on August 30, with an inaugural show of photography and video called “Still Moving Image.” It features the work of 25 artists, a fraction of the roughly 2,000 contemporary pieces that make up Mr. Poddar’s collection, along with an estimated 5,000 folk and tribal pieces, which are his mother’s passion.
India is bursting with commercial art galleries, but Devi is poised to be what the Poddars’ home has been for many years: a noncommercial, nonprofit exhibition space for contemporary art from India and the subcontinent.
In a way, Devi (online at www.deviartfoundation. org) is the natural next step for a country awash in new wealth, soaring art prices and a prolific crop of artists and collectors.
The birth of the Devi Art Foundation signals a sort of turning point in the Indian art scene, in that it opens up a private family trove to the public and is devoted entirely to contemporary art.
The Poddars are known in the art world here for their daring eye, for seeking out artists before they start fetching high prices or become recognizable names at fashionable Delhi dinner parties.
Mr. Poddar, whose day job is running an upscale hotel company, admits to being inspired by his mother, who began collecting modern and folk art several decades ago.
Except that the work his mother sought out, including pieces by the post-Indian-independence generation of artists known as the Progressives, did not resonate with the son. He gravitated toward artists of his own generation.
His first acquisition, in 1999, was a lifesize pink fiberglass cow by Subodh Gupta. “It was quintessentially Indian but modern in its essence,” he said. “That’s what spoke to me.”
The obsession flowered quickly.
Mr. Poddar acquired the bone and velvet series, by Anita Dube, from its previous owner, whose family did not want it displayed at home, which is understandable. One of the pieces is a human rib cage fashioned into a bordello-style red velvet fan. It found pride of place on the dining table here - in a vegetarian household, no less.
Art, Mr. Poddar is fond of saying, is something you have to live with no matter how provocative. “You can’t avoid it. Also, it’s not safe.”
Sometimes, he said, he wonders why he hadn’t taken up gardening instead.