A wonderful anarchy, 2018
'In the process of transforming found objects, and continually experimenting with materials, she layers references: to the mythological and scientific, secular and ritualistic, physical and psychological. At the center of all works is the abstraction of shape and confluence of time in a provocative meeting of materials.' (HauserWirth, no date)
Of the installation 'A wonderful anarchy’ (2018). 'Acting as a dynamic counterpoint to the outdoor bronze, this new balance work brings together her vast curation of personal belongings, heirlooms, and found or collected pedestrian objects. Kher weaves this detritus of the studio in a manner so rapidly that she says the moment of making was ‘of synchronicity and rhyme.’ Dysfunctional staircases, yarns of wool, rusted urns, and the remnants of ominous black lace are pushed up against chains, scales, horns and hooks, even the most pristine of miniature figurines – suspending the domestic and the captive, in perfect stillness. The anchor of this supposed serenity is not just the ropes and pulleys, but also the pillar that stands at a distance from the entropy it holds together, representing a state of resilience and counterbalance in a world constantly in flux.
Hauser and Wirth (no date) Bharti Kher, Wonderful Anarchy Available at : https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/25350-bharti-kher-wonderful-anarchy (Accessed 9 November 2020)
Of the installation 'A wonderful anarchy’ (2018). 'Acting as a dynamic counterpoint to the outdoor bronze, this new balance work brings together her vast curation of personal belongings, heirlooms, and found or collected pedestrian objects. Kher weaves this detritus of the studio in a manner so rapidly that she says the moment of making was ‘of synchronicity and rhyme.’ Dysfunctional staircases, yarns of wool, rusted urns, and the remnants of ominous black lace are pushed up against chains, scales, horns and hooks, even the most pristine of miniature figurines – suspending the domestic and the captive, in perfect stillness. The anchor of this supposed serenity is not just the ropes and pulleys, but also the pillar that stands at a distance from the entropy it holds together, representing a state of resilience and counterbalance in a world constantly in flux.
Hauser and Wirth (no date) Bharti Kher, Wonderful Anarchy Available at : https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/25350-bharti-kher-wonderful-anarchy (Accessed 9 November 2020)
Mother and child, 2014
'Her taste for artistic metaphysics has been honed over two decades of unusually positioned inquiry; Kher’s status as a reverse emigre, having moved to her family’s country of origin from England at the age of 23, imbued her work with a rare and specific diasporic perspective from the outset, one that has encouraged fluid, non-chronological takes on sex, identity, and the human condition.'
'Kher’s pieces provide a topology of cultural misinterpretation, weaving Hindu mythology, tantric painting and found objects together in sweeping odes to selfhood. Her pieces slice through the theatre of assumption with fine-tuned resonance, toying with our collective need for answers by asking further questions. Kher isn’t a strictly narrative artist, and has always been drawn to the angular junctures of mis-matched belief systems, often pairing spare two-dimensional compositions with more materially complex, confrontational sculptures.'
'Since 1995, Kher has been adorning her pieces with bindis. Aveek Sen writes:
At once ritual and cosmetic, abstract and culturally specific, traditional and contemporary, the bindi--a mass-produced dot of variable size that subcontinental women stick on their foreheads--is a “third eye”: the micro-unit of a symbolic code, associated with a mode of vision that ranges from the intuitive to the numinous. But Kher’s use of this code also yokes these registers of symbolic meaning to the intimate and the everyday, to a vast and variously hierarchical social demography of women, in which the individual mingles with the collective, and absence is haunted by the ghosts of presence
There’s something about this symbol swarming over her otherworldly surfaces that renders subjects both magical and infected, and nowhere is that ambiguity more poignant than Kher’s The Skin Speaks A Language Not Its Own, which fetched over a million dollars at Sotheby’s London auction in 2010.
'Kher’s pieces provide a topology of cultural misinterpretation, weaving Hindu mythology, tantric painting and found objects together in sweeping odes to selfhood. Her pieces slice through the theatre of assumption with fine-tuned resonance, toying with our collective need for answers by asking further questions. Kher isn’t a strictly narrative artist, and has always been drawn to the angular junctures of mis-matched belief systems, often pairing spare two-dimensional compositions with more materially complex, confrontational sculptures.'
'Since 1995, Kher has been adorning her pieces with bindis. Aveek Sen writes:
At once ritual and cosmetic, abstract and culturally specific, traditional and contemporary, the bindi--a mass-produced dot of variable size that subcontinental women stick on their foreheads--is a “third eye”: the micro-unit of a symbolic code, associated with a mode of vision that ranges from the intuitive to the numinous. But Kher’s use of this code also yokes these registers of symbolic meaning to the intimate and the everyday, to a vast and variously hierarchical social demography of women, in which the individual mingles with the collective, and absence is haunted by the ghosts of presence
There’s something about this symbol swarming over her otherworldly surfaces that renders subjects both magical and infected, and nowhere is that ambiguity more poignant than Kher’s The Skin Speaks A Language Not Its Own, which fetched over a million dollars at Sotheby’s London auction in 2010.
The skin speaks a language all its own
'In discussing her work, most critics have made straight-forward through-lines between Kher’s personal and national allegiances and the figures she creates. However, in an interview ... that same year, Kher insisted, “It’s easy to say that the displacement in my work reflects my personal life, that the misunderstanding is about myself—they say, “They’re you’; I say, ‘No, they’re you’. Those feelings of neither being from here or there don’t just apply to those who move from different countries.” '
Installation view of 'Matter' exhibition, 2016
'There's a symphonic, dystopian element to Kher's work, and her hybridized monstrosities seem to bear witness the sort of shifting social modalities they comment upon. Never coy, but often sphynxlike, her art registers the full scale of human emotion.'
Artspace editors, 2019, A 101 Guide to the Work of Bharti Kher: A Cultural Alchemist Available at: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/meet_the_artist/a-101-guide-to-the-work-of-bharti-kher-a-cultural-alchemist-1-56306 (Accessed 9 November 2020)
Artspace editors, 2019, A 101 Guide to the Work of Bharti Kher: A Cultural Alchemist Available at: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/meet_the_artist/a-101-guide-to-the-work-of-bharti-kher-a-cultural-alchemist-1-56306 (Accessed 9 November 2020)