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Lot 65

 

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Bharti Kher’s is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world attending to exhibitions of her art. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In... Bharti Kher’s is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world attending to exhibitions of her art. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In addition to an autobiographical examination of identity, Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India.

In 2000, Kher painted a series of domestic interiors typical to India’s aspiring middle-class, in an early attempt to pinpoint and define ‘home’, a word associated with the apogee of stability, and "a site from which to excavate meaning" about one’s existence. The present lot, exhibited along with this series of domestic interiors, interrogates the mutability of identity, and its relationship to consumption and the home. Peter Nagy explicates, "Our mirrors are the objects we purchase, the designs we choose, and the arrangements we inhabit. Certainly, we may harbor fantasies of our true selves and how we would express these selves through dream environments but, at the end of the day, our economic limitations (or lack thereof) speak volumes of who we really are in this world" (The Private Softness of Skin, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2000, unpaginated).

Here, a photorealist rendering of a bedroom shares the surface with several different types of chairs emblematic of the choices available in designing one’s home and, subsequently, in defining one’s life style and identity. The juxtaposition of a meticulously detailed interior with the chairs, starkly placed against a flat background, and the fact that the last row of chairs is left incomplete only adds to the epic metaphor that frames the elements of this canvas. "Kher is careful to leave a part of each of her pictures of interiors unfinished, only sketched in, to imply the transient lifestyles which often inhabit such interiors….The painted collage, with its roots in Surrealism and Pop Art as well as the Indian institution of the hand-painted photograph, can best serve this reflection of a culture which is, by its very nature, hybridized, contradictory and luxuriously complex" (Ibid.).

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