Bharti Kher was born in 1969 in London, UK. She studied painting, graduating in 1991 from Newcastle Polytechnic with a BA Honours, Fine Art, before moving to New Delhi, India, in 1993.
Experimentation and alchemy are key to Kher’s practice, which explores materiality, secularity, and spirituality, creating new meaning in objects and hybrid narratives that move fluidly between fact and fiction, and certainty and uncertainty. Deeply interested in our experience of an artwork and its relationship to the body, her work often challenges preconceived ideas of gender and femininity, ‘tapping into mythologies and the numerous diverse associations a thing or place can bring’.
Kher is recognised as a leading contemporary artist with a career spanning over three decades and has developed a well-earned reputation from a multitude of international exhibitions and installations. Her Public Art Fund commission, Ancestor, a bronze universal mother figure, is currently on view in New York and her Intermediaries sculptures are exhibited by Parasol Unit at the Venice Biennale until 27 November. Kher has presented several UK solo exhibitions over the last 20 years, such as A Wonderful Anarchy, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2019; and gallery and museum presentations: This Breathing House, Freud Museum, London; 2017; Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, 2012; and Virus, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 2008.
Her work has also been shown in numerous international group exhibitions and is held in public and private collections across the world. Significantly she has been recognised elsewhere by awards such as the prestigious Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters), in France, 2015; the ARKEN Art Prize, Denmark, 2010, and the Sanskriti Awards, India, 2003. She is represented internationally by Hauser & Wirth, Perrotin and Nature Morte.
