(b. 1969)
Born in London, Bharti Kher studied at the Middlesex Polytechnic, London and at the Newcastle Polytechnic, where she received her BA with honours in Fine Art. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field. Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India. She uses the ‘bindi’, a dot indicative of the third eye worn by the Indian women on their foreheads, as the central motif and most basic building block in her work. Some of her solo exhibitions include ‘Misdemeanours’, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, in 2014; ‘Anomalies’, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, in 2013; ‘The Hot Winds that Blow from the West’ at Hauser & Wirth, New York, in 2012; ‘Live Your Smell’ and ‘Sing To Them That Will Listen’ at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, in 2011 and 2008; ‘Disturbia, Utopia, House Beautiful’ at Gallery SKE, Bangalore, in 2010-11; ‘Inevitable Undeniable Necessary’ at Hauser and Wirth, London, in 2010; ‘Virus’ at Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2008; and ‘An Absence of Assignable Cause’ at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, in 2007. Her works have also been included in group exhibitions including ‘Seduction by Masquerade’ at Nature Morte, New Delhi, in 2011; ‘Between the Worlds’ at Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, in 2010; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, in 2009; ‘Who’s Afraid of the Artists?’ at Palais des Arts de Dinard, France, in 2009; ‘Shifting Shapes, Unstable Signs’ at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, in 2009; ‘Re-Imagining Asia’ at the New Art Gallery Walsall, London, in 2009; ‘Distant Nearness’ at Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas, in 2008; and ‘Passage to India’ at Initial Access Gallery, Wolverhampton, in 2008. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.