Bhupen Khakhar

Bern, Kunstmuseum, Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, 20 September 2007 - 10 February 2008

Oudenburg, Foundation De 11 Lijnen, Orientations: Trajectories in Indian Art, 2010

Fibicher, B. and S. Gopinath, eds., Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Germany, 2007, p. 102 illus.

Ananth, D., Orientations: Trajectories in Indian Art,  Belgium, 2010, p. 91 illus.

In good overall condition. Minor surface abrasion to center of canvas, just left of the doorway. Canvas is not entirely square to frame.
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Born in Mumbai into a middle-class Gujarati family, Bhupen Khakhar trained as an accountant but moved to Baroda in 1962, where he chose a new career path as a writer and an artist. Largely self-taught, Khakhar was encouraged by his friend Gulammohammed Sheikh and later became a key figure at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda. The Baroda school's primary focus became figurative art with a strong emphasis on narrative. Khakhar and his peers organised the landmark exhibition Place for People that travelled to Delhi and Bombay in 1981. The exhibition marked the move away from the Modernism associated with the Progressives and a development of an Indian Post-modernist aesthetic that was centred on the representation of the human figure within a local context. Khakhar used the exhibition as an opportunity to display his ‘coming out’ painting You Can’t Please All, 1981. From then onwards Khakhar's works began to address personal and biographical themes as he himself became more open about his sexuality. He chose to portray ironic depictions of social types and in doing so, mocked the tastes and aspirations of the Indian middle-class. Khakhar continually pushed the boundaries of subject matter, often touching on topics that were controversial and taboo. In turn, he was one of the first artists from India to be celebrated in the West with major museum exhibitions and retrospectives at the Tate in Britain as well as the Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sophia, Madrid.

Khakhar's sources were derived from autobiographical references combined with Indian miniatures, images from popular culture and religious iconography. Like a number of his Baroda contemporaries, Khakhar often used multiple narrative episodes across a single picture plane. This particular compositional technique was inspired by Italian Renaissance painting and most notably the work of the 14th century painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Khakhar was particularly influenced by Lorenzetti's fresco, The Well Governed City (1338), which he saw on his first visit to Europe in 1974.

In Satsang, Khakhar depicts a Hindu gathering with a group of male figures paying their respects to a deceased member of the community. Khakhar has placed himself twice within the narrative, prominently depicted at the left in the foreground and repeated amongst the seated figures to the right. There is an interplay between the vibrant hues on the canvas and the scene of lamentation, which is a contradiction one finds in many of Khakhar's works.