For Bharti Kher, each work is an enigma. For nearly three decades, the artist, born in London in 1969 and now based in India, has been building a body of work that proceeds through hybridizations, contradictions, and allegorical narratives. She invents worlds populated by chimeras, fantastical animals, and symbols wrested from tradition in order to better reinscribe them in an uncertain present.
In Paris, the Perrotin gallery is dedicating an exhibition to him this autumn entitled "The Sun Splitting Stones," which brings together a series of monumental paintings, the Weather Paintings, veritable fields of force where the tensions of our time are condensed, and will also present several sculptures by the artist, extending into space the metamorphoses and tensions present in his canvases.
In these recent canvases, oil and oil pastel are manipulated until they transform into organic matter. The paint does not merely represent; it acts like a body, breathing, cracking, consuming itself. In The Sun Splitting Stones (2023-2024), monumental painting approximately 3 meters wide, the light seems to crack the very surface of the canvas, as if the solar heat had the power to break stone. Mother's Fury (2023) translates the telluric anger of a nature in revolt, while The Hunger (2023-2024) evokes, in fleshy colors, the voracity and fragility of life. These are not serene images but physical experiences, storms materialized on the surface of the painting.
This pictorial energy can only be understood in light of Bharti Kher's entire career. From her beginnings, she has made bindiThis frontal point, traditionally worn by women in India, is a recurring motif. Multiplied infinitely, declined in spirals or in the shape of spermatozoa, it becomes in her works a second skin, a cosmic constellation, a sign that is both feminine and universal, intimate and decorative. "Both masculine and feminine, symbolically and conceptually... The result is a contradictory visual aesthetic.", she explains, regarding these trivial forms that have become a visual language. Through them, she blurs the lines between virility and fertility, the everyday and the marvelous.
Critic Kanu Agrawal aptly described his creations as "fables born from an ecological and technological dystopia, where humans, animals, and machines coexist in a bloodless world." What might seem like a baroque fantasy thus reveals itself as a direct commentary on our times. His mutant creatures, his surfaces saturated with bindis or her paintings, imbued with the anger of the climate, make visible the fractures of modernity. Mutation, she says, is not only an aesthetic process, but a survival technique, a camouflage against the old patriarchal regimes.
This feminine and materialistic reading of art, as critic Geeta Kapur described it, is the perspective women bring to bear on "the material reality of the things that constitute the active substance of life." In Bharti Kher's work, the everyday is transformed into the marvelous, and the sublime is often tinged with the ridiculous. bindi, which has become a floating sign, condenses this tension: at once a fashion accessory and an identity symbol, it lends itself to all mutations, just like his art.
Trained at Middlesex Polytechnic in London and then Newcastle Polytechnic, where she graduated with honors in painting, she now lives in New Delhi. Her work has been exhibited in major international institutions, from Central Park in New York to Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England, and has been the subject of significant exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Hayward Gallery in London, and the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. This international trajectory, without ever erasing the Indian roots of her vocabulary, testifies to a conscious exploration of the "in-between worlds," those spaces where the boundaries between nature and culture, the intimate and the political, the interior and the exterior dissolve.
Presenting these works in Perrotin's Parisian gallery, in the heart of the Marais district, places this pictorial gesture on an international stage where Bharti Kher now occupies a major position. And echoing this moment, the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen is dedicating an exhibition to the same period, entitled "Mythologies." There, the enduring nature of foundational narratives dominates, while in Paris, it is the fury of the elements. Two approaches that testify to the same ambition: to invent a contemporary mythology capable of expressing, with intensity, the fragility of our time.
“The Sun Splitting Stones”
Perrotin Paris
10, Impasse Saint-Claude, Paris 3e
Until December 20, 2025
perrotin.com
