Important Notice

“When I feel I’m telling the truth, then there is no restraint.” – BHUPEN KHAKHAR

Bhupen Khakhar’s artistic practice was deeply influenced by his time in Baroda, to where he had moved in the early 1960s to study art criticism. Here, with the help of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, who Khakhar was friends with, he was exposed to the legacy of the Baroda School of artists, including G R Santosh, K G Subramanyan, N S Bendre and Jyoti... “When I feel I’m telling the truth, then there is no restraint.” – BHUPEN KHAKHAR

Bhupen Khakhar’s artistic practice was deeply influenced by his time in Baroda, to where he had moved in the early 1960s to study art criticism. Here, with the help of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, who Khakhar was friends with, he was exposed to the legacy of the Baroda School of artists, including G R Santosh, K G Subramanyan, N S Bendre and Jyoti Bhatt.

“I came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for me to stay in Bombay and paint. Because my family members would not allow me. I wanted a complete freedom. At the back of my mind it also must be my gay attitude. I wanted to be in a college for [a] few years so as to learn the craft of painting.” (Artist quoted in Nada Raza, “A Man Labelled Bhupen Khakhar Branded as Painter,” Chris Decron and Nada Raza eds., Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, London: Tate Publishing, 2016, p. 14) In Baroda, Khakhar also met British Pop artists Derek Boshier and Jim Donovan. The latter played a vital role in introducing Khakhar to Western Pop Art, which the artist soon adapted to his own practice.

Beginning in 1965, Khakhar worked on collages which included elements of symbolism and rituals associated with Hinduism. These works were associated with “two main sources; the icon-images of wayside temples and hand painted shop signs. There is a long tradition in India of capturing an elusive divinity or propitiating a spirit by act of anointing. A wall surface, a stone, a tree trunk, or an upturned pot are smeared with red paint to mark them as auspicious and an offering of food, flowers and incense are placed before the spot. This creates, as it were, an ‘ instant’ temple… Both in subject-matter and idiom Bhupen’s work of this phase is very close to this traditional source. The iconimages were almost literally recreated, - though often made more bizarre.” (Geeta Kapur, In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting, Baroda: Vrishchik Publication, 1973, online)

In the present lot, Khakhar alludes to a temple by enclosing the familiar vermillion-coloured embodiment of a temple deity within neatly defined colour blocks. Surrounding it is a smattering of handprints and scripts invoking the figure of Rama.

His works from this period are reminiscent of the “style of the American modern artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg - raised and layered surfaces, bright colours, gilt and printed posters, pasted-on eyes. The devotional and the everyday, garish and grotesque - he did not shy away from the saturated bazaar aesthetic in this early period, unafraid of kitsch of exotica.” (Chris Decron and Nada Raza eds., p. 14) Such abstract and modern works, rooted in referenced traditions, brought Khakhar considerable recognition in later years.

On the unique personal idiom developed by Khakhar, his friend and biographer Timothy Hyman noted that it was a hybrid, “...in which Rousseau, Hockney, Sienese pedellas, the oleographs of the Bazaar, the temple maps of Nathdwara and awkward observations of ‘Company’ painters, are all fused together. And with this idiom a new world opened, which no painter had ever dealt with before; the vast expanses of half-Westernised modern urban India.” (Bhupen Khakhar, A Critical Difference: Contemporary Art from India, Aberystwyth: Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 1993, p. 3)

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