Important Notice

Born into a middle-class Gujarati family in 1934, Bhupen Khakhar trained as an accountant at the University of Bombay, a profession he continued to pursue alongside his art for most of his life. He began practising art in earnest only in his late twenties, after moving from Bombay to Baroda, where he enrolled in a two-year Art Criticism course at the Maharaja Sayajirao University Faculty of Fine Arts in 1962. He immersed himself in the city’s... Born into a middle-class Gujarati family in 1934, Bhupen Khakhar trained as an accountant at the University of Bombay, a profession he continued to pursue alongside his art for most of his life. He began practising art in earnest only in his late twenties, after moving from Bombay to Baroda, where he enrolled in a two-year Art Criticism course at the Maharaja Sayajirao University Faculty of Fine Arts in 1962. He immersed himself in the city’s thriving artistic and intellectual community and considered artists Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Vivan Sundaram, and critic and art historian Geeta Kapur as close friends.

Conscious of his lack of formal training in art, Khakhar began studying painting and pictorial techniques and arrived at a visual repertoire that referenced both high and low culture. These included the works of Henri Rousseau and David Hockney, Sienese art, Indian miniature paintings, the oleographs of the bazaar, and the kitsch of popular Indian iconography. He was introduced to British pop art by artist Jim Donovan, with whom he briefly shared a room in the early 1960s, and his earliest works were collages that blended popular urban imagery such as film posters, advertisements, and the lurid religious icons of roadside shrines.

Alongside contemporaries Sheikh and Sundaram, Khakhar went on to play a significant role in the new wave of narrative and figurative painting that emerged from the Baroda school of painting. His oeuvre was fuelled by an interest in human nature and a “commitment to the world of the insignificant man” (Nada Raza, “A Man Labelled Bhupen Khakhar Branded as Painter,” Chris Dercon and Nada Raza eds., Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, London: Tate, 2016, p.16). By 1972, he began producing ‘trade paintings’, a series of works depicting the lives of everyday people and layered with a complex commentary on class, sexuality, and societal norms. He once declared, “Human beings in their local environment, climate, provincial society; this should be the ultimate goal of the artist.” (Raza, p. 18)

Khakhar’s home in Baroda-christened Parmanand, meaning supreme happiness-became a “bohemian gathering place” (Raza, p. 14) for friends from all walks of life, many of whom he would go on to immortalise in his works. “Inevitably, many of the poets, playwrights, and artists who made up Khakhar’s circle made their way into his paintings; in this way, Khakhar’s body of work is also a poetic record of a vibrant time and a place.” (Ngar Azimi, “Bhupen Khakhar”, 5 March 2017, Artforum, online)

The subject of the present lot is veteran architect Karan Grover, a friend and patron of Khakhar, portrayed against the backdrop of Champaner, a UNESCO World Heritage site about 50 kilometres from Baroda. Dating back to the 15th century, it is among the few medieval heritage sites in India with specimens of both Islamic and Hindu architecture. Grover “inherited” the site from his professor at MSU, R N Mehta, who had spent 30 years excavating the buried city, and has been instrumental in its restoration and conservation through his NGO Heritage Trust.

Painted in 1996, less than a decade before the artist’s death, the present lot is a fine example of Khakhar’s mature work and exhibits stylistic choices typical of his works of this decade, such as The Banyan Tree, 1997, and Jatra, 1997–99. He was known to begin painting his canvases with one flat expanse of a single colour, and then gradually paint additional elements on this base, followed by a “pigment-brushed” finish, creating a silken sheen. In the present lot, the brighter blues and pinks of the previous decade are retained but appear more muted. “Like the Sienese painters, Khakhar uses saturated colour, but his hues take on something of the chemical impurity of modern Indian decor, with both the panoramas built from a strange harmony of Burnt Sienna and Prussian Blue.” (Timothy Hyman, “You Can’t Please All,” Dercon and Raza eds., Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, Tate, 2016, p. 51)

As artist and writer Timothy Hyman observes, by the 1980s, Khakhar’s work had grown in scale and complexity. In the present lot, Grover appears as a larger-than-life figure in the bottom left of the frame, with the Champaner landscape populated by smaller vignettes of indistinguishable male figures in the background. This narrative composition recalls Russian and Byzantine icons and 14th-century Sienese paintings, which the artist first saw on his travels to the Soviet Union, Italy, and Britain in the 1970s, as well as Indian miniatures. Though Khakhar rejected the idea of form in art, “he consistently used painterly space in original ways: His early paintings presented pictures within pictures, playing on the miniature tradition; his middle work eschewed linear perspective, presenting space in a natural, untutored fashion; and in his later works, he enabled us almost to walk through his paintings.” (Usha Mirchandani, “A Retrospective,” Bhupen Khakhar: A Retrospective, NGMA Mumbai, 2003, p. 29)

Khakhar balances the public and private, openness and intimacy in his composition. Though Grover is depicted as a frontal figure, his gaze is averted and his stance remains slightly awkward, a device Khakhar often used to convey vulnerability in his male figures. Shadowy, featureless men gather in pockets of the undulating landscape. Notably, near Grover’s right shoulder sits a man with white hair, much like the artist’s own. This semi-autobiographical character appears in many of Khakhar’s works of the 80s and 90s, likely an act of self-assertion after his own coming out as a gay man following a visit to England in 1979. According to Hyman, the artist also associated this particular type of landscape—set against a water body surrounded by lush vegetation—as a symbolic means of exploring his sexuality.

He remarks, “Khakhar’s coming out in the course of the 1980s was probably the most courageous act of his life, and it may also prove to be one of the most consequential. The most striking change was that his art became explicitly confessional, as often as not including a self-portrayal…the self is always juxtaposed to the world; the self interrogates, and is interrogated by, the world.” (Timothy Hyman, “Sexuality and the Self,” Bhupen Khakhar, Chemould Publications and Arts in association with Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1998, p. 68)

During his lifetime, Khakhar’s work was frequently exhibited in India and abroad, including at the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (1982), the Tokyo Biennale (1984), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1986), Documenta IX, Kassel (1992), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia, Spain (2002). Following his death in 2003, surveys of his work were held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai (2003) and the Tate Modern, London (2016). An iconoclast, he is remembered not only for his unabashed love of kitsch and performance but also a rare honesty and openness that permeated his art.

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF KARAN GROVER

CHAMP OF CHAMPANER

Karan Grover is an award-winning architect and founder of design firm Karan Grover Associates, which he started in 1985. A passionate advocate of the preservation of cultural heritage and sustainable development, he became the first architect in the world to win the USGBC Platinum Award for the greenest building in the world in 2004. He was nominated as a Social Entrepreneur Fellow of the Ashoka Foundation, Washington, and is a Permanent Honorary Fellow of the National Academy of Environment.

Most notably, Grover is responsible for winning UNESCO World Heritage Site status for Champaner-Pavagadh. Located about 50 km from Vadodara, the rich heritage site was originally built in 746 CE. It was captured in 1484 CE by Sultan Mahmud Begada, a ruler of the Sultanate of Gujarat who decided to shift his capital city from Ahmedabad to Champaner. The city reached its zenith under his rule and the structures that he built represent some of the best specimens of both Hindu and Islamic architecture. The remnants today include fortresses, mosques, temples, stepwells and other monuments dating from the 8th to 14th century, among which are the Jami Masjid, whose architecture is regarded as an important precursor to Mughal-style architecture, and the Kalika Mata temple that dates back to before the 1st century CE. The town likely takes its name from the golden yellow hue of the rocks of Pavagadh hill, at the base of which Champaner lies.

Grover first became acquainted with Champaner when he came to Baroda in 1969 to study architecture at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU). He began studying the site under the mentorship of Professor R N Mehta, an archaeologist who had spent 30 years excavating the 2000-year-old buried city. Under Mehta’s mentorship, he developed a passion for the unique architecture of the heritage city and upon his professor’s death, continued to undertake conservation projects at the site through the NGO Heritage Trust which he founded in 1984. In its first documentation of a buried city in the last century, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was able to identify over 60 forested areas and document 114 monuments above ground at Champaner. Through sustained efforts, Grover has brought international attention to the city, hosting the first World Congress in India on Heritage and Conservation at Champaner in 1987, holding lectures on its archaeological and cultural importance worldwide, and inviting global experts to visit the site. After a 22-year campaign by Grover, Champaner was awarded World Heritage status by UNESCO at Suzhou, China in 2004.

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