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Lot Essay
In Bhupen Khakhar’s oeuvre, there seem to be no discrete dichotomies between aesthetic attitudes in the ways often posited by western art criticism. His work transcends oppositions between the Avant Garde and the kitsch or banal, regarding ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as constantly interacting and informing each other. This multivalent approach to ideation and creation made Khakhar’s entry into the art world in the mid-1960s with a series of collaged works featuring images drawn from pop-culture, the bazaar and religious prints, uniquely radical for its time. In the present lot, painted more than thirty years later, images derived from both popular culture and highly personal discourse once again appear on the same picture plane. Illuminating the arc of Khakhar’s remarkable career, this unique work underlines his steadfast commitment to innovation and challenging the status quo through clever commentary on taste and social constructs like class.
With such definitive philosophies, it might come as a surprise that as an artist, Khakhar was an autodidact who only started exhibiting in his thirties. Born in Mumbai in 1934, he was trained and employed as a chartered accountant before his passion for the arts was kindled and he moved to Baroda. There, he was surrounded by artists and intellectuals like his close friend Gulammohammed Sheikh, and immersed himself in learning about ancient Indian visual culture, global art history and the transgressive possibilities of current western movements like Pop Art. This led Khakhar to arrive “at a hybrid idiom, in which [Henri] Rousseau, [David] Hockney, Sienese pedellas, the oleographs of the Bazaar, the temple maps of Nathdwara and awkward observations of ‘Company’ painters, are all fused together. And with this idiom a new world opened, which no painter had ever dealt with before; the vast expanses of half-Westernised modern, urban India” (T. Hyman, A Critical Difference, London, 1993, p. 3).
Khakhar began incorporating graffiti, calendars and posters, and seizing the potential of popular iconography and language to shape his work. The political radicalism of the 1960s also found its way into his practice, bolstered by his self-identification as an outsider. Following his coming out in the 1980s, Khakhar’s work is also read as championing the underrepresented in its confrontation of complex subjects like class, sexuality, and the aging and diseased male body. “He found himself speaking for a class and a world hitherto unregarded, unrecorded. The most striking change was that his art became explicitly confessional, and as often as not including a self-portrayal” (T. Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Mumbai, 1998, pp. 71-72).
The present lot, one of a series of three double-sided cut-out portraits of Bollywood stars that Khakhar painted in collaboration with the Baroda based billboard artist Vamanrao Khaire, represents a culmination of his vanguardism, in medium, subject and form. Commissioned for the major 2001 exhibition, Century City, Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern in London, these works combined the very different expertise and skills of the two artists to examine the role of consumerism, hedonism and the cult of celebrity in India at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Here, on the reverse of a portrait of Bollywood megastar Shahrukh Khan painted by Khaire in the typical style film posters, Khakhar offers his take on another, relatively unfamiliar, mega-movie industry based in Southern India. His ‘southern star’, with slick black hair and a pencil moustache, is draped in flower garlands and has as big of a fan following as any Bollywood hero. However, his reputation is regional, largely unknown beyond South India and its diaspora. Once again elevating the ‘unregarded’, here Khakhar uses soft pastel tones to illustrate the stature and versatility of southern actors, transforming his subject’s torso into a landscape dotted with vignettes that appear to be scenes from his repertoire, including romantic trysts and action sequences where he plays characters of various ages and backgrounds.
In this series of cut-outs, Khakhar “succeeds in wresting the powers of representation from the morally replete realist mode and puts in its place a composite urban/popular language of sentimental and transgressive exchange special perhaps to India” (G. Kapur and A. Rajadhyaksha, Century City, Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, London, 2001, p. 32).
With such definitive philosophies, it might come as a surprise that as an artist, Khakhar was an autodidact who only started exhibiting in his thirties. Born in Mumbai in 1934, he was trained and employed as a chartered accountant before his passion for the arts was kindled and he moved to Baroda. There, he was surrounded by artists and intellectuals like his close friend Gulammohammed Sheikh, and immersed himself in learning about ancient Indian visual culture, global art history and the transgressive possibilities of current western movements like Pop Art. This led Khakhar to arrive “at a hybrid idiom, in which [Henri] Rousseau, [David] Hockney, Sienese pedellas, the oleographs of the Bazaar, the temple maps of Nathdwara and awkward observations of ‘Company’ painters, are all fused together. And with this idiom a new world opened, which no painter had ever dealt with before; the vast expanses of half-Westernised modern, urban India” (T. Hyman, A Critical Difference, London, 1993, p. 3).
Khakhar began incorporating graffiti, calendars and posters, and seizing the potential of popular iconography and language to shape his work. The political radicalism of the 1960s also found its way into his practice, bolstered by his self-identification as an outsider. Following his coming out in the 1980s, Khakhar’s work is also read as championing the underrepresented in its confrontation of complex subjects like class, sexuality, and the aging and diseased male body. “He found himself speaking for a class and a world hitherto unregarded, unrecorded. The most striking change was that his art became explicitly confessional, and as often as not including a self-portrayal” (T. Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Mumbai, 1998, pp. 71-72).
The present lot, one of a series of three double-sided cut-out portraits of Bollywood stars that Khakhar painted in collaboration with the Baroda based billboard artist Vamanrao Khaire, represents a culmination of his vanguardism, in medium, subject and form. Commissioned for the major 2001 exhibition, Century City, Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern in London, these works combined the very different expertise and skills of the two artists to examine the role of consumerism, hedonism and the cult of celebrity in India at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Here, on the reverse of a portrait of Bollywood megastar Shahrukh Khan painted by Khaire in the typical style film posters, Khakhar offers his take on another, relatively unfamiliar, mega-movie industry based in Southern India. His ‘southern star’, with slick black hair and a pencil moustache, is draped in flower garlands and has as big of a fan following as any Bollywood hero. However, his reputation is regional, largely unknown beyond South India and its diaspora. Once again elevating the ‘unregarded’, here Khakhar uses soft pastel tones to illustrate the stature and versatility of southern actors, transforming his subject’s torso into a landscape dotted with vignettes that appear to be scenes from his repertoire, including romantic trysts and action sequences where he plays characters of various ages and backgrounds.
In this series of cut-outs, Khakhar “succeeds in wresting the powers of representation from the morally replete realist mode and puts in its place a composite urban/popular language of sentimental and transgressive exchange special perhaps to India” (G. Kapur and A. Rajadhyaksha, Century City, Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, London, 2001, p. 32).