.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Having completed his training as a chartered accountant in Bombay, Bhupen Khakhar moved to Baroda in 1962 to pursue a career in art. At the time Baroda was becoming an important center for 'New Indian Art' and as Enrique Juncosa points out, "[...] the city had given its name to a whole generation of painters -- the Baroda School -- including G.M. Sheikh, Nalini Malani and Sudhir Patwardhan, as well as the influential critic Geeta Kapur. The work in this large group of figurativist painters is characterized, as the British painter Timothy Hyman reports in his monograph on Khakhar, by spaces filled with figures, meticulous descriptions, the Sienna School, Breughel, Bonnard, Kitaj and, above all, the whole revised Indian traditio." (E. Juncosa, 'The Integrative Art of Bhupen Khakhar', Bhupen Khakhar: A Retropective, Mumbai, p. 12)
Bhupen Khakhar's paintings are marked by their strong narrative quality. The artist often draws from reality, recreating his observations of the urban middle class man and his surroundings with an acute attention to detail. The present work shows a number of utensils placed in a typical kitchen of a home in an Indian village. While Khakhar maintains a certain degree of abstraction in the objects of the kitchen, he is careful to complete the panorama of the space creating depth in the canvas by showing the viewer the landscape outside. Incorporating the bold and bright colours used in pop art, Khakhar's painting simultaneously displays a faux naivet and primitivism that references traditional textiles and pichhavais.
"The subject-matter of Bhupens work is deliberately banal. It provides a View from the Teashop, the wayside teashop in a small town with its derelict clienteleWith this imagery, part nave, part cunning and part "vulgar", Bhupen finds on his canvas a place for the insignificant man: a place that is so much like his actual environment that the subject will not feel alien in it." (G. Kapur, quoted in T. Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Bombay, 1998, p. 41)
Bhupen Khakhar's paintings are marked by their strong narrative quality. The artist often draws from reality, recreating his observations of the urban middle class man and his surroundings with an acute attention to detail. The present work shows a number of utensils placed in a typical kitchen of a home in an Indian village. While Khakhar maintains a certain degree of abstraction in the objects of the kitchen, he is careful to complete the panorama of the space creating depth in the canvas by showing the viewer the landscape outside. Incorporating the bold and bright colours used in pop art, Khakhar's painting simultaneously displays a faux naivet and primitivism that references traditional textiles and pichhavais.
"The subject-matter of Bhupens work is deliberately banal. It provides a View from the Teashop, the wayside teashop in a small town with its derelict clienteleWith this imagery, part nave, part cunning and part "vulgar", Bhupen finds on his canvas a place for the insignificant man: a place that is so much like his actual environment that the subject will not feel alien in it." (G. Kapur, quoted in T. Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Bombay, 1998, p. 41)