Important Notice

Lot 14

 

Quick Zoom

Bharti Kher is renowned for her versatility, creating works across various mediums- paintings, textiles, sculptures, and collages. At the heart of her practice are her sculptures, which often feature hybrid characters that blur the lines between humans, nature, and politics. These have been subjects of various exhibitions over the last two decades, most recently a powerful exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the United Kingdom. For... Bharti Kher is renowned for her versatility, creating works across various mediums- paintings, textiles, sculptures, and collages. At the heart of her practice are her sculptures, which often feature hybrid characters that blur the lines between humans, nature, and politics. These have been subjects of various exhibitions over the last two decades, most recently a powerful exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the United Kingdom. For decades, Kher has drawn on mythology and evolutionary theory and used the “push and pull of material and meaning” to create composite figures that challenge perceptions of race, identity, and gender. (Meera Menezes, “Morphed Selves, Mixed World”, Art India, February 2022) A common thread through her diverse body of work is an exploration of the body in its material, mythical, and symbolic forms.

The present lot features two figures that are part primate, part human, “their hirsute nakedness marking a declaration of war despite the accoutrements of civilisation they display: one is mantled in a pelt and the other wears a golden necklace; on reflection, these objects seem like tribute exacted from some unwary traveller by these twin regents of vacancy.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Pursuit of Extreme Propositions: Recent Works by Bharti Kher”, Bharti Kher, New York: Jack Shainman Gallery, 2007, p. 7) In such animal sculptures, she explores her enduring interest in nature and the animal kingdom, viewing them not just as integral parts of an intertwined ecological system but also interrogating their rich symbolic potential.

Remarks writer and critic Ranjit Hoskote, “one of Kher’s key projects is the re-enchantment of the animal as a symbol, a symptom, a guide: she wishes to retrieve the animal from the fabular realm, for the activity of symbol-making, which she marks as her resistance against a world in which animals have been reduced to brutalised laboratory slaves or unwilling zoo-bound entertainers. In Kher’s handbook of xenography, wildness or mutation are conditions that prompt rage, hatred or stigmatisation because they cannot immediately be understood or neutralised; so that species could also stand for race, in her treatment, and animal ferocity or desire could represent choices that cannot be contained within the prevailing definition of normality.” (Hoskote, pp. 9-10)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site