Bhupen Khakhar

Biography

The first works Khakhar showed to the public were not paintings in the usual sense. He cut images of gods out of cheap popular prints, glued them onto mirrors and added graffiti-like inscriptions and sweeping marks of the brush. The viewer saw in such a piece both a god and his own reflection.

He was born on 10 March 1934 in Bombay, then part of British India. His family came from artisans who had emigrated from Diu, at that time a Portuguese colony. Khakhar was the first in the family to enter the University of Bombay, where he studied economics and political science. At his family’s insistence he then took a Bachelor of Commerce at Sydenham College and qualified as a chartered accountant. For many years he worked as an accountant with the firm Bharat Parikh & Associates in Baroda (now Vadodara), turning to art in his free time. In those years he also studied Hindu mythology and literature thoroughly and was well informed about the visual arts.

In 1958 he met the Gujarati poet and painter Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh. Sheikh urged him to visit the recently founded Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. According to some accounts, Khakhar later attended courses in art criticism there; according to others he remained self-taught, and that description is the more common one.

He held his first solo exhibition as early as 1965. Critics noticed him fairly soon, although he had no professional training. By the 1980s his solo shows were taking place in London, Berlin, Amsterdam and Tokyo.

He began painting in oils, according to some accounts, in the early 1970s. His pictures were often built as narratives and contained autobiographical motifs. The heroes of his early works were ordinary people: a barber, a watch repairer, an assistant accountant with whom he had worked. Khakhar took great care to reproduce the interiors of small Indian shops and had a gift for finding the intriguing in the humdrum. His work has been compared with that of David Hockney. British Pop influenced him, but he understood that the Western version of Pop Art would not resonate in India in the same way. Hence the label “India’s first ‘Pop’ artist”, under which he is presented abroad. From 1975 he was a friend of the British painter Howard Hodgkin, who after they met regularly stayed with him.

Critics singled out his openly homosexual subjects. At the time, India rarely discussed the matter in public. Khakhar painted love and encounters between men from an Indian point of view, and questions of gender and identity became one of the main themes of his painting. He was himself an openly gay artist, and it seems to me that without that decision many of his later works would read quite differently.

In the painting “You Can’t Please All” (1981), a life-size naked figure, a self-portrait, watches from a balcony as a father, a son and a donkey from an ancient fable move through the streets of a town. The action is told in one continuous band across the townscape.

In the 1990s he worked more often in watercolour and grew steadily more confident in it. In Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Moor’s Last Sigh” Khakhar recognised himself in a character who is an accountant, and he answered with a portrait of the writer, “The Moor”, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. His work was shown at the São Paulo Biennial (the ninth) and at documenta IX in Kassel in 1992.

Khakhar received the Padma Shri, an Indian state honour (1984), the Starr Foundation Fellowship of the Asian Council (1986) and the Prince Claus Award, presented to him at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam in 2000. His works are held by the British Museum, Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He died on 8 August 2003 in Vadodara. Tate Modern held a retrospective in 2016, which then travelled to the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin.