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Lot Essay
Bhupen Khakhar, a chartered accountant by trade, moved from Bombay to Baroda in 1962 to study Art Criticism at the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S. University, in search of the community and environment he craved to sustain his creative process. These first few years in Baroda were critical for Khakhar’s artistic development. It was home to the Baroda Group, a pioneering art collective formed in 1956 by artists from the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S. University, including G.R Santosh, K.G. Subramanyan, N.S. Bendre and Jyoti Bhatt. Although the group formally disbanded the year of Khakhar’s arrival, it had firmly established Baroda as an important centre for artistic exchange, out of which emerged a new generation of the Indian avant-garde. In this community, Khakhar also met British Pop artists Derek Boshier and Jim Donovan, the latter sharing a house with Khakhar for eight months.
Donovan played a critical role in Khakhar’s early career by exposing him to the vocabulary of Western Pop Art, which the artist soon assimilated and applied to his own practice. “It was through Western Pop Art that Bhupen Began to look at the virulent popular culture of India. There is an overwhelming manifestation of popular tastes in India: it is visible in the pictures of gods and goddesses, film stars, national leaders; in shop signs, theatres, temples and restaurants; in the manufacture of cheap industrial goods. There is an orgy of visual images that clamber upon each other and seduce their audience with a surreptitious eroticism [...] It seems to me that Bhupen as an artist was persuaded to respond to popular culture only on the assurance of Western Pop Art.” (G. Kapur, In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting, Baroda, 1973, unpaginated)
In 1963 Khakhar began to collect and collage images of gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. Soon, Khakhar was combining these collages with swathes of vivid paint in larger works like Pan Shop No. 1, executed in the mid-1960s. Together, this small body of work embodies an exciting formative period of experimentation for the artist out of which emerged his now iconic style.
Pan Shop No. 1 balances a bold, yet kitschy Pop aesthetic with the vivid palette of classical miniature paintings to create a pastiche depiction of bazaar iconography. At the heart of these bazaars would often be a paan shop, where locals gathered and exchanged the day’s news while chewing potent mouthfuls of betel leaf, areca nut and tobacco, and staining the surroundings with their vivid red expectorate. Perhaps it is these tell-tale stains left by paan chewers that Khakhar references in the intense red that dominates this canvas.
The iconic subject matter and use of collage reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg gives the present work both a mock votive quality and a sense of Post-Modern playfulness. These early works were exhibited in Khakhar’s first solo show at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai in 1965, and a similar work from this series was included in the major 2016 retrospective of the artist’s work at the Tate Modern in London.
Donovan played a critical role in Khakhar’s early career by exposing him to the vocabulary of Western Pop Art, which the artist soon assimilated and applied to his own practice. “It was through Western Pop Art that Bhupen Began to look at the virulent popular culture of India. There is an overwhelming manifestation of popular tastes in India: it is visible in the pictures of gods and goddesses, film stars, national leaders; in shop signs, theatres, temples and restaurants; in the manufacture of cheap industrial goods. There is an orgy of visual images that clamber upon each other and seduce their audience with a surreptitious eroticism [...] It seems to me that Bhupen as an artist was persuaded to respond to popular culture only on the assurance of Western Pop Art.” (G. Kapur, In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting, Baroda, 1973, unpaginated)
In 1963 Khakhar began to collect and collage images of gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. Soon, Khakhar was combining these collages with swathes of vivid paint in larger works like Pan Shop No. 1, executed in the mid-1960s. Together, this small body of work embodies an exciting formative period of experimentation for the artist out of which emerged his now iconic style.
Pan Shop No. 1 balances a bold, yet kitschy Pop aesthetic with the vivid palette of classical miniature paintings to create a pastiche depiction of bazaar iconography. At the heart of these bazaars would often be a paan shop, where locals gathered and exchanged the day’s news while chewing potent mouthfuls of betel leaf, areca nut and tobacco, and staining the surroundings with their vivid red expectorate. Perhaps it is these tell-tale stains left by paan chewers that Khakhar references in the intense red that dominates this canvas.
The iconic subject matter and use of collage reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg gives the present work both a mock votive quality and a sense of Post-Modern playfulness. These early works were exhibited in Khakhar’s first solo show at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai in 1965, and a similar work from this series was included in the major 2016 retrospective of the artist’s work at the Tate Modern in London.