Lot Essay
A year after his initial experiments with ceramics at the European Ceramic Centre in the Netherlands, Bhupen Khakhar returned to the medium in India during a month-long residency at Delhi’s Sanskriti Kendra in 1995. Speaking about the artist’s forays into this new medium, Sadanand Menon noted, “In a curious way, one has always anticipated Bhupen Khakhar scratching clay and getting fired up on ceramics; an anticipation fuelled by the painter’s consistent partiality to a lustre palette – the environmental, architectural, human and organic forms in his canvas forever bathed in a surreal sheen; his figures reveling in an aura of luminescence, otherwise available only to the ceramic medium. The almost eerie, iridescent hair, lips, eyes, elbows, buttocks, balconies, turrets, trees and boats within the converging geography of his urbanscapes; the ongoing tension between sharp angles and teasing curves in his frames, seem to foretell their future existence as installed objects; a future solidification that his favourite painterly ground of reddish sienna, alice blue and salmon pink aspire for.” (S. Menon, ‘Landscapes with Depths, The Ceramic Dreams of Bhupen Khakhar’, Bhupen Khakhar Exhibition of Ceramics and Water Colour, New Delhi, 1996-97, unpaginated)