How many trees can you count? Eight, surely. Yet Bhupen Khakhar’s own account of Old Men Playing Chess insists there are seven. A simple mistake, a private joke, or something more deliberate? In Khakhar’s world, even the artist can’t quite be trusted to tell us what we’re seeing.
Painted around 1972, Old Men Playing Chess turns a quiet game into something more elusive: a meditation on friendship, ageing, mortality and the slippery business of interpreting art. Along the way, Khakhar’s wonderfully eccentric exhibition catalogue reveals an artist who could create a painting, critique it, and then quietly undermine his own authority. Perhaps that is the game. Perhaps there were always eight trees. This provocative piece is on offer in the Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art auction taking place at Sotheby's London on 29 September.
