Bharti Kher

Bharti Kher was born in London in 1969. She studied painting, graduating in 1991 from Newcastle Polytechnic. At 23, she moved to New Delhi in India, where she now lives and works. She is represented by Hauser & Wirth, Perrotin and Nature Morte

Bharti Kher’s art gives form to quotidian life and its daily rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms their meaning to yield an air of magical realism. Now living in New Delhi, her use of found objects is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, collecting, and transforming, as she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object and initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits.

Her work encompasses painting, sculpture and installation, often incorporating found materials, using them to transform objects and dissolve the distinction between two and three dimensions. Sculptures she has made since the mid-2000s combine animal with the human body to create hybrid female figures which confront the viewer with a compelling mixture of sexuality and potential.  In parallel, her bindi ‘paintings’ are abstract and aesthetic, turning mass-produced items into artworks of sumptuous beauty. These works are engaged with the body through abstraction and repetition, mythology of symbols and the narrative of sign.

Solo exhibitions include Arnolfini, 'Bharti Kher. The Body is a Place', Bristol, UK (2022); Nature Morte, 'Strange Attractors', New Delhi, India (2021); IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art, 'Bharti Kher. A Consummate Joy', Dublin, Ireland (2020); Perrotin, 'Bharti Kher. The Unexpected Freedom of Chaos', New York NY (2020); and Hauser & Wirth, 'A Wonderful Anarchy', Somerset, UK (2019). She has taken part in numerous group exhibitions at various institutions including  The Design Museum, London; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; KNMA, New Delhi, India: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Australia; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and Serpentine Gallery, London.