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Lot Essay
Bhupen Khakhar’s unique idiom and perceptive works have made him one of India’s most well-known contemporary artists. His paintings have been exhibited across the world to great critical acclaim, with solo shows at museums and galleries in Berlin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, New York, Vancouver, New Delhi and Mumbai, with his most recent retrospective, Bhupen Khakhar – You Can’t Please All, held at the Tate, London, in 2016.
Khakhar’s portraits of middle-class India are characterized by their unique spatial arrangements, bold use of color and dark humor. Amused by petit bourgeois morality, the artist took pleasure in distorting traditional ideas of life in Indian towns and cities to create images that contained a satiric double discourse. “A man of exceptional courage and generosity, of radiant charm and mischievous humour [...] His art is founded on two interwoven themes: his concern for ‘ordinary’ people and objects; and his quest for a visual language by which the experience of the partly westernised middle-class Indian, the ‘Insignificant Man’, might find expression” (T. Hyman, ‘Bhupen Khakhar Obituary’, The Independent, 21 September 2003).
This large and skillfully executed watercolor figuratively and literally illuminates the experiences of what Hyman dubs ‘the insignificant man’. Here, two men sit on a striped sheet, each spotlighted by a bright bulb overhead. The figure on the left, wearing a comfortable kurta and pajama, seems to welcomingly reach out to the other, who is formally dressed in Western clothes and appears to be kneeling before him. Through these figures and the relationship they share, Khakhar explores the overt, unquestioned intimacy between males in middle-class India. He also challenges the counterfeit prudishness of contemporary society in the country, which, in his opinion, was a direct effect of colonization. He noted that it was the “British Raj and the Victorian inheritance that has made us timid. At a certain stage in our history, the British made us feel ashamed of our own sexuality and made us feel inferior because our society’s traditionally more open approach to body and sex. This has now made us into a nation of hypocrites and we don’t want to be who we are. It will take many years to outgrow this” (Artist statement, S. Menon, The Hindu Magazine, 14 September 2003).
Khakhar’s portraits of middle-class India are characterized by their unique spatial arrangements, bold use of color and dark humor. Amused by petit bourgeois morality, the artist took pleasure in distorting traditional ideas of life in Indian towns and cities to create images that contained a satiric double discourse. “A man of exceptional courage and generosity, of radiant charm and mischievous humour [...] His art is founded on two interwoven themes: his concern for ‘ordinary’ people and objects; and his quest for a visual language by which the experience of the partly westernised middle-class Indian, the ‘Insignificant Man’, might find expression” (T. Hyman, ‘Bhupen Khakhar Obituary’, The Independent, 21 September 2003).
This large and skillfully executed watercolor figuratively and literally illuminates the experiences of what Hyman dubs ‘the insignificant man’. Here, two men sit on a striped sheet, each spotlighted by a bright bulb overhead. The figure on the left, wearing a comfortable kurta and pajama, seems to welcomingly reach out to the other, who is formally dressed in Western clothes and appears to be kneeling before him. Through these figures and the relationship they share, Khakhar explores the overt, unquestioned intimacy between males in middle-class India. He also challenges the counterfeit prudishness of contemporary society in the country, which, in his opinion, was a direct effect of colonization. He noted that it was the “British Raj and the Victorian inheritance that has made us timid. At a certain stage in our history, the British made us feel ashamed of our own sexuality and made us feel inferior because our society’s traditionally more open approach to body and sex. This has now made us into a nation of hypocrites and we don’t want to be who we are. It will take many years to outgrow this” (Artist statement, S. Menon, The Hindu Magazine, 14 September 2003).