Bhupen Khakhar
(India 1934–08 Aug 2003)
- Title
- Bathing Ghat
- Place of origin
-
Baroda →
Gujarat →
India
- Cultural origin
- Baroda school artist
- Period
- Contemporary circa 1945 - onwards → India
- Year
- 1992
- Media category
- Materials used
- colour lithograph
- Dimensions
-
37.5 x 53.5cm image; 56.6 x 76.6cm sheet
- Signature & date
- Signed, l.r, pencil, Gujarati script, [untranslated]. Not dated.
- Credit
- Purchased 1994
- Accession number
- 356.1994
- Copyright
- © Bhupen Khakhar
- Location
- Not on display
- Further information
Bhupen Khakhar is one of India's leading painters. He also works with water-colour and printmaking. He lives an openly gay life in Baroda, an industrial town half-way between Mumbai (Bombay) and New Delhi. Bhupen Khakhar paints everyday, middle-class life in an Indian urban environment. His oil paintings and watercolours, influenced by Indian miniature painting and popular Indian calendar art, take no regard of perspectival accuracy and instead present figures in looming dark and anchorless spaces. One has the sense that his paintings represent stage sets for homosexual dramas. His treatment of the theme is often humorous as well as radical, as his embracing men are depicted in the context of Indian temple life or mythology. The artist draws on the sexual ambiguity in traditional Indian art as the inspiration for his work.
Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 296.
- Bibliography (4)
-
Bruce James (Australia) (Author), Edmund Capon (England; Australia, b.1940) (Director), Art Gallery of New South Wales handbook, Domain, 1999, 296 (colour illus.).
Haema Sivanesan (Australia) (Assistant Curator), Indian Painting, Sydney, 2001. cat.no. 6.18
'Contemporary Painting in Urban and Village India', The Asian Collections Art Gallery of New South Wales 2003, 2003, 57 (colour illus.).
Victoria Lynn (Australia) (Author), India Songs: multiple streams in contemporary Indian art, Sydney, 1993, 53. cat.no. 10
- Exhibition history (2)
-
India Songs, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 01 Apr 1993–09 May 1993.
Indian Painting, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 06 Apr 2001–11 Jun 2001.
