Bharti Kher (b. 1969) was born in London and majored in Painting, Fine Arts BA, from the Newcastle Polytechnic in the UK. Her art gives form to quotidian life and its daily rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms their meaning, with her own personal language of alchemy and mythology. Her use of found objects is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. Amongst Kher’s signature materials, loaded with symbolism is the bindi, which first appeared in her work in 1995.
Kher’s recent solo exhibitions include: ‘A consummate Joy’, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2020); ‘Chimeras’, Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel (2018); ‘Dark Matter’, Museum Frieder Burda, Berlin, (2017).
Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution’, British Museum (2020); ‘Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South’, Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (2020); ‘Desire: A revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age’, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2019); ‘Surface Work’, Victoria Miro, London (2018); ‘Like Life: Sculpture, Colour and the Body (1300-Now)’, The Metropolitan Museum, New York (2018).
In 2022, Ancestor, an 18-foot-tall bronze sculpture commissioned by Public Art Fund was unveiled in New York. Kher’s works are in the collections of the Tate and the British Museum in the UK; the National Museum of Canada; the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; the Walker Art Center and the North Carolina Museum of Art in the US, amongst others.
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