Bharti Kher

Bharti Kher was born in London in 1969. She studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and then at Newcastle Polytechnic, graduating in painting in 1991. In India she met the artist Subodh Gupta, later her husband, and she has lived in New Delhi since 1993.

Her signature material is the bindi, the small dot worn on the forehead. It first appeared in her work in 1995, after she saw a woman in a market wearing a bindi shaped like a serpent. She lays bindis across panels, paintings and sculpture in great numbers, so that a mark usually read as faith, marriage or fashion becomes pattern, skin and surface. Some of the patterns in her paintings go back to her student work of the late 1980s.

The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006) is a life-size fibreglass elephant covered in bindis, two of the most familiar signs of India joined in one object. In the Intermediaries series she takes the brightly painted clay figurines set out in south Indian homes during the autumn festival season, breaks them and reassembles the pieces into new creatures: animal hybrids, people who are not quite people.

She works across painting, sculpture, installation and text. Recent solo exhibitions include A Consummate Joy at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2020 and The Body is a Place at Arnolfini in Bristol in 2022. Her work is in the collections of Tate Modern, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Walker Art Center.