bharti kher

Through a shifting interplay of gender binaries and physiological hybridities, Bharti Kher's artistic practice has described a long-term negotiation of her identity in India. Raised in England, Kher was educated in painting and design at Newcastle and Middlesex Polytechnics. Since 1993, she has lived and worked in Delhi, with her transnational perspective engendering both personal and ethnographic observations of contemporary Indian life.

Kher's solo exhibition "The Private Softness of Skin," first shown in New York in 2000 and then at Gallery Chemould in 2001, inserted emblems of the emergent Indian middle-classes into painted renderings of domestic interiors. Importing precise attention to details that would signify even minor social stratification, Kher became a carpenter in two dimensions, constructing and commenting on individual rooms in an imagined modern home.

The artist began an ongoing engagement with issues of gender in Hirsute, a project undertaken from 1999 to 2001 in which she studied variations in the moustaches worn by different men in her neighborhood; as an abstraction of the conventions of masculinity, the work arranged painted close-ups of individual moustaches in a rectilinear grid. At the same time, the artist introduced a series that transformed brightly colored bindis, part of a traditional feminine iconography, into patterns evoking male sperm and genetic chains, respectively, in Spit and Swallow (1999) and All Sheep Are Not the Same (2006).

For other projects, Kher has used sculptural installation to manipulate issues of autobiographical and cultural identity. Her 2004 "Hybrids" showcased composite, textured monsters that boasted human and animal, male and female, mythic and mundane parts. Partly a subversion of traditional ideals of femininity, Kher's creatures also indicate the unresolved mutability and complexity of contemporary, hybridized urban culture.

Beth Citron