Lot 59: Bharti Kher (b. 1969)

Bharti Kher (b. 1969)
Untitled
bindis on painted board
68 1/8 x 122 3/8in. (173 x 311cm.)
Executed in 2008

London, The Saatchi Gallery, The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, 2010 (illustrated in colour, pp. 138-139). Lille, Tri Postal, The Silk Road, 2010-11 (illustrated in colour, p. 52).

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

VAT rate of 20% is payable on hammer price plus buyer''s premium
Executed in 2008, Bharti Kher's Untitled is a phantasmagorical disco of brightly coloured bindis. Glowing in an assembly of every shade from fluorescent pink to pitch black, the work offers a pronounced beauty that is at once abstract and culturally resonant. The composition swirls in vast clusters of differently scaled spheres, drawing the focus in and out of the picture plane with unintelligible cosmic rhythm.

Untitled reflects the increasingly prevalent cultural interchange between emerging 'New India' and the rest of the world. Buoyed by the economic reforms of the 1990s, India has reclaimed its geopolitical prominence and empowered its artists to take position on the global stage. Drawing from the wealth of references available outside of their native country, including the rich history of 20th and 21st century global art, Indian artists have ventured into new territory, increasingly challenging their own identities and associations. In Untitled, with her original use of bindis, Bharti Kher both invokes the spirituality of this symbol of the third eye, so prevalent in Hindi culture and comments on the pronounced effects of globalisation and diaspora on traditional identity, articulating it in the language of 20th century abstraction.

For Kher, the question of identity is of keen interest due to her own 'officially' hybrid status. Having been brought up in London and educated in Newcastle, Kher moved to Delhi in the 1990s with her husband and fellow artist Subodh Gupta. There she experienced a selfproclaimed 'supernova' or cultural epiphany, when she encountered a woman wearing a serpent shaped bindi on her forehead. This powerful symbol of spiritual awareness is the popular version of the revered Bindu in Hinduism, which marks the 'primordial point' associated with demure femininity. It immediately occurred to Kher, that this small but culturally important signifier had evolved to entrain different associations for each society and each woman. In projecting the bindi on such a brightly articulated and elaborate scale, Kher privileges the questions of identity, gender and race within the globalising environment. She gently subverts the bindis original associations, deconstructing their religious context and creating an abstract work of aesthetic beauty. At the same time she offers the viewer a moment of almost spiritual contemplation and meditative peace.