Bharti Kher

Private collection

Arario Gallery and the artist, Beijing

Christie's London, 30 June 2010, lot 2

Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Hungry God, June-October 2007
New York, Jack Shainman Gallery, Bharti Kher- An Absence of Assignable Cause, November-December 2007 

R. Hoskote, Bharti Kher, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2007, illustration pp. 124-125

A few of the bindis have lifted off the work which occurs in Bharti Kher's bindi works. Adhesive is visible on the areas of the mirror where bindis have come off. There are very minute scratches on the mirror only apparent under very close inspection which were most likely created during the artistic process and application of the bindis, as this work is framed behind glass. There is natural discolouration to the bindis and this work is in good overall condition for its age and medium.
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Bharti Kher is a trans-cultural artist, drawing experiences from both her British and Indian roots. Born in London and trained in Newcastle, Kher is a rare reverse émigré who moved back to India from the United Kingdom in 1992 at the age of 23, having not set foot on Indian soil for almost twenty years. Questions of her own identity and her place as a successful female artist with a western upbringing in modern Indian society are inevitably entwined into her ethnographic observations of contemporary Indian life.   Her work thus engages with issues of migration, identity, femininity and sexuality.
An enormous triptych created by the artist in 2006, Itch, Scratch, Raw consists of three distinct reflective aluminium panels covered with thousands of felt bindis in intricately arranged patterns. Since the mid 1990s, Kher has appropriated the bindi in all its various shapes, colours and forms to create complex works that are visually mesmerising, technically time consuming and conceptually multi-layered. The term bindi is derived from bindu, the Sanskrit word for a dot or a point, sometimes considered the creative seed or womb of the universe. In India, it is traditionally a mark of pigment applied to the forehead associated with the Hindu symbol of the third eye. When worn by women in the customary colour of red, it is a symbol of marriage yet in recent times it has become a decorative item, worn by unmarried girls and women of any religion and transformed into a fashion accessory. The morphing of the traditional significance of the bindi from a symbol full of latent religious meaning to a mass produced object that has become an increasingly global commodity, is relevant to Kher's work informed by her experiences of having lived and worked in both the UK and India.
Based in Gurgaon, a surburb of New Delhi, Kher works from a massive studio. In her large scale works, she is known to work with an army of female studio assistants, most of them immigrants who have flocked to the metropolis from smaller towns and villages in India. They help her apply these bindis in abstract configurations that resemble plots of migration flows. From a distance you observe clusters and splashes of multi-coloured dots and upon close inspection you witness painstakingly applied individual dots in carefully arranged colour compositions.
The migratory patterns, social roles, traditional rituals, gender relationships and popular culture of India, both past and present are all scrutinised from Kher's unique vantage point. Her appropriation of the bindi has promoted it to the status of icon, an instantly recognisable symbol of and for the artist. “The detailed structure of the bindis leads us to a hyper-realistic world that soon becomes both magical, due to their vibrant colors and form, and realistic, through their sheer presence and sense of three-dimensionality.” (Z. Ardalan, Second Skin that Speaks the Truth, Parasol Unit, London, 2012, p. 15)
A popular work in her oeuvre, this was exhibited at an exhibition titled Hungry God at Art Gallery of Toronto in 2007. The exhibition was a seminal one; it was the first time in the AGO’s 117 year old history, that contemporary art from India was showcased in a dedicated manner.  The exhibition showcased  the most spectacular work from the region and was a standing testimony to the time when Indian contemporary art became a global sensation.