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Lot 49

 

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Born in Mumbai in 1934, Bhupen Khakhar trained and worked as a chartered accountant before turning to painting and moving to Baroda in the early 1960s. An entirely self-taught artist, Khakhar developed a highly individualized artistic vocabulary, arriving at a "…hybrid idiom 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... Born in Mumbai in 1934, Bhupen Khakhar trained and worked as a chartered accountant before turning to painting and moving to Baroda in the early 1960s. An entirely self-taught artist, Khakhar developed a highly individualized artistic vocabulary, arriving at a "…hybrid idiom 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" (Timothy Hyman, A Critical Difference, Aberystwyth Arts Centre exhibition catalogue, London, 1993, p. 3). The narratives in his figurative works were often personal, focusing on small-town life in India and the experiences of the country's great middle-class. In their depictions of everyday life and traditional rituals and rites of passage, the artist's vivid oils and watercolours magnify these experiences, highlighting the universal threads running through them.

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 or 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 important canvas executed in 1990, gay relationships were portrayed no differently than heterosexual ones - tender and governed by the same human emotions of love and desire. Here, we see a celebration of the love shared by a couple, perhaps Khakhar and his partner, through the simple image of the two sharing a quiet moment against an inspired landscape. Watching the sun set on a range of hills across a river, the companions seem to transcend the routines of their daily lives, leaving behind with them the social mores and taboos that circumscribe their relationship.

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