Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1969 London England

Biography

Painter, sculptor, and installation artist Bharti Kher was born to parents of Punjabi origin from India in London, England in 1969. Her mother was a sari maker, and her father worked in the textile trade. Kher pursued her studies at Middlesex Polytechnic from 1986 to 1988, later earning a BA Honours in Fine Arts and Painting from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1991. Kher came of age in 1980s Britain, a period marked by significant social change under the Thatcher government, when traditional institutions, such as trade unions and financial systems, were either being opened up or dismantled. These experiences would later influence her artistic practice. After graduation, a coin toss led Kher to New Delhi, India, where she serendipitously met local sculptor Subodh Gupta - whom she would later marry and with whom she would collaborate. She also cites fellow Brit, Hanif Kureishi, the Anglo-Indian novelist and filmmaker, as a significant influence on her work: ‘I thought it was sexy, rude, and punk,’ (Kher quoted in The Wick Culture, 2024).

Kher’s oeuvre spans a wide range of media, including sculpture, painting, textiles, and installations, varying from small to large scale, often dealing with themes of the female body, her South Asian heritage, and ideas of balance and intermediaries. Her practice is often undeniably feminist and maternal. She frequently incorporates bindis - the coloured stickers worn by Hindu and Buddhist women in South Asia, which carry deep cultural and historical significance - layering them onto painted boards. Kher’s sculptures are often cast in bronze, meticulously rendered to resemble brightly painted clay, and feature hybrid, fantastical forms on a grand scale. Some of her works include surreal, headless bodies topped with bunches of bananas, characterised by vibrant colours, and a timeless quality. In her more recent sculptures, Kher explores themes of magic, animism, and spirituality through monochromatic plaster casts of living people. These figures have also included her parents and casts of six living, middle-aged female sex workers from Kolkata's red-light district. The relationship between mother and child often features in Kher's work, taking on hybrid forms, such as in: Mother and Child, Amar, Akbar, Anthony(2017) or within the exhibition Intermediary Family(2019). In these iterations, the mothers’ bodies are often incomplete, split in two, grotesque yet poignant, burdened with representations of others.

Kher’s practice is non-linear, characterised by an inquiry into visual exploration, spirituality, and materiality. Keeping a journal is also an important aspect of Kher's process. Her focus on the act of making allows her ideas to be energetically embodied and expressed through found objects and materials, transforming them into their own unique language and text. A deep curiosity about history, philosophy, scientific discoveries, and cross-cultural references and assiduous notetaking underpin this approach. This aspect of her practice was particularly revealed during her residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, USA in 2017.

Kher has exhibited her work widely in the UK and internationally. The diverse range of exhibition spaces has allowed her to respond to each site’s unique energy, interweaving new works with existing ones and challenging the audience’s perception of her oeuvre. Her 2016 exhibition at Hampstead's Freud Museum, This Breathing House, explored both the psychoanalyst's personal life and his theories, creating a dialogue with the building itself. In recent years, Kher has held three major solo exhibitions in the UK and Ireland. A Consummate Joy presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2020), featured a layered bindi installation entitled Virus XI, a 30-year project. In this display, Kher drew parallels between Indian and Irish paganism, focusing on the magical elements of quotidian life and its rituals. Bharti Kher: The Body is a Place at Bristol's Arnolfini Gallery (2022) challenged the audience to engage with both their own bodies and with the body of work on display. Alchemies at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2024) was a major retrospective of Kher’s 25 years of practice, the location enabling Kher to reference family memories of local trade relationships in West Yorkshire, as well as feminist and postcolonial narratives.

Kher was awarded the Arken Art Prize in 2010 and in 2016 she received the title of Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres from the French state. One of her most publicly visible works is Ancestor, created in 2017 with the support of a Public Art Fund grant. From 2022 to 2023, the 18-foot statue with 24 heads stood at the entrance to Central Park in New York, USA. In a New York Times interview, Kher described the work in a narrative that is equal parts provocative, learned, and spiritual (Mitter, 2022). Since the 1990s, the family (Kher and Gupta have two daughters) has been based in New Delhi, India, though since 2018, Bharti Kher has divided her time between London, England and New Delhi. In the UK public domain, her works are part of the Tate collection.

Related books

Clare Lilley and Hettie Judah, Bharti Kher: Alchemies, exh. cat. (Wakefield: Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2024)
Gemma Brace, ed., Bharti Kher: The Body is a Place (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2022)
Cheryl Sim, ed., Relations: La Diaspora et la Peinture = Relations: Diaspora and Painting, exh. cat. (Montreal: Fondation PHI pour l'art contemporain, 2020)
Aveek Sen, Chrysanne Stathacos and Susan Silas, Bharti Kher: Chimeras, exh. cat. (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2018)
Daina Augaitis and Diana Freundl, eds., Bharti Kher: Matter, exh. cat. (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016)
Stephanie Rosenthal, Bharti Kher: This Breathing House, exh. cat. (Zürich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2016)
Sandhini Poddar, Misdemeanours Bharti Kher = Qing zui : Ba'erti Ka'er, exh. cat. (Shanghai: Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher, 2014)

Public collections

Tate London

Related organisations

Middlesex Polytechnic (Student)
Newcastle Polytechnic (Student)

Selected exhibitions

Bharti Kher: Alchemies (solo exhibition), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Yorkshire (2024)
Parasol Unit (group exhibition), Venice Biennale, Venice (2024)
Bharti Kher (solo exhibition), Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, (2022)
Strange Attractors (solo exhibition), Nature Morte, New Delhi, India (2021)
A consummate joy (solo exhibition), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2021)
From Tantra to Enlightement (group exhibition), British Museum, London (2020)
A Wonderful Anarchy, Bharti Kher (solo exhibition), Hauser and Wirth, Somerset (2019)
Bharti Kher, Chimeras (solo exhibition), Kunsthaus Pasquet, Biel, Germany (2019)
Dijiins, Things, Places (solo exhibition), Galerie Perrotin, Tokyo, Japan (2018)
Sketchbooks and Places (solo exhibition), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA (2017)
Bharti Kher – This Breathing House (solo exhibition), Freud Museum, London (2016)
Bharti Kher: Misdemeanours (solo exhibition), Rockbound Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2014)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Bharti Kher]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Bharti Kher artist