Bhupen Khakhar
(1934 - 2003)
Untitled
Born in Mumbai in 1934, Bhupen Khakhar trained and worked as a chartered accountant before moving to Baroda in the early 1960s to study art criticism. Turning to painting in his late thirties, Khakhar quickly developed a highly personal narrative in his figurative works, focusing on small-town life in India and the experiences of the country's great middle-class. As his paintings reference popular culture, in their depictions of traditional...
Born in Mumbai in 1934, Bhupen Khakhar trained and worked as a chartered accountant before moving to Baroda in the early 1960s to study art criticism. Turning to painting in his late thirties, Khakhar quickly developed a highly personal narrative in his figurative works, focusing on small-town life in India and the experiences of the country's great middle-class. As his paintings reference popular culture, in their depictions of traditional rituals and rites of passage, the artist's vivid oils and watercolours magnify these experiences along with those of his own everyday life, highlighting the universal threads running through them. Describing the personal idiom Khakhar developed, his friend and biographer Timothy Hyman noted that it was a hybrid, "…in which Rousseau, Hockney, Sienese pedellas, the oleographs of the Bazaar, the temple maps of Nathdwara and awkward observations of 'Company' painters, are all fused together. And with this idiom a new world opened, which no painter had ever dealt with before; the vast expanses of half-Westernised moderm urban India" (A Critical Difference, Aberystwyth Arts Centre exhibition catalogue, 1993, p. 3). After a visit to England in 1979, when Khakhar publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, his images took on the progressive and often bold politics of his life as a gay activist. Through the male figure, frequently images of the white haired artist and his partner, Khakhar challenged social mores and popular perceptions, "…speaking for a class and a world hitherto unregarded, unrecorded" (Timothy Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Chemould Publications and Arts, Mumbai, 1998, p. 68). In these works, including the present lot, an epic acrylic painting on patterned fabric, gay relationships were portrayed no differently than heterosexual ones - tender and governed by the same human emotions of love and desire.
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Lot
12
of
70
AUTUMN AUCTION 2011
21-22 SEPTEMBER 2011
Estimate
Rs 40,00,000 - 50,00,000
$86,960 - 108,700
Winning Bid
Rs 48,06,264
$104,484
(Inclusive of Buyer's Premium)
ARTWORK DETAILS
Bhupen Khakhar
Untitled
Acrylic on printed fabric
93 x 55 in (236.2 x 139.7 cm)
EXHIBITED: Anecdotes, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2011
Category: Painting
Style: Figurative
ARTWORK SIZE:
Height of Figure: 6'