For the duration of the 59th Biennale Arte di Venezia, 23 April to 27 November 2022, Parasol unit will present Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained, a group exhibition of works by eleven international contemporary visual artists at the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello in Venice.

The exhibition brings together diverse and thought-provoking works and includes some interdisciplinary collaboration between music and visual art. The artists, Darren Almond, Oliver Beer, Rana Begum with Hyetal, Julian Charrière, David Claerbout, Bharti Kher, Arghavan Khosravi, Teresa Margolles, Si On, Martin Puryear, and Rayyane Tabet, all work in different media to address a disparate range of topics. Yet, common to them all is a deep concern for our world and a preoccupation with a comparable phenomenon that in scientific terms is defined as entropy, that is the measure of disorder, randomness, and unpredictability within a system.  

Nature Morte is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by the artist Bharti Kher. Kher has consistently explored ways of art-making through a wide variety of materials since the beginning of her professional artistic practice in the 1990s. Her life-size sculpture of a dying elephant, entitled “The Skin Speaks a Language Not its Own” and created in 2006, remains one of her most iconic works and endures as a benchmark of maturity for contemporary art from India.

On view will be a selection of recent sculptures from 2017 to 2021. Kher has chosen to exhibit these works together precisely because they reference and relate to the body, albeit the body in multiple manifestations, and the spaces both outside of and within the body: physical, psychological, and mythical.

“Kher brings a fresh display of a widely heterogenous practice to New York after a gap of 8 years. New York is no longer the same city when Bharti Kher showed here last. But as someone who believes that “change is the very nature of our bodies,” Kher is here to remind us that she is not the same artist either. In this latest encounter between artist and the city, the animal is still displaced but now morphed into an intentional absurdity. The bindi remains, in its rigorous ubiquity, but its surface no longer ensconced, comes to us instead as something broken, and fittingly then, as viewers will see in fluxes of time such as these – as something powerful. It comes as an unexpected freedom of chaos”

For full press release please visit : https://static.perrotin.com/presse_expo/press_release_7356_1.pdf?v=1581521120

IMMA is delighted to present A Consummate Joy, a solo exhibition by by Bharti Kher. The exhibition comprises nineteen works, ranging from sculpture, painting, installation, watercolours, and the latest edition in a 30 year artwork Virus XI (2020). 

Kher’s art gives form to daily life and its rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms its meaning to yield an air of magical realism. Now living in New Delhi, India. Kher’s use of found objects is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social surroundings. Kher's way of working is exploratory; surveying, looking, collecting and transforming, as she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object and initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits. 

Bharti Kher will give a talk on the opening night.

Exhibition reopening dates will be announced shortly

This fall, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is celebrating the living legacy of artists at the Museum with their exhibition In the Company of Artists: 25 Years of Artists-in-Residence, where spaces throughout the Museum and the Historic Palace will be activated with participatory artworks and performances, live portrait drawing, storytelling, and a three-day film festival.

Bharti Kher will give a talk on the opening day.

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is pleased to present ‘A Wonderful Anarchy’, an exhibition of new work by Bharti Kher, following her three-month residency with the gallery in 2017. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset and marks a return to the most elemental themes within her practice. Kher, who works across a multitude of forms, will present a body of sculpture, installation and paintings. In the process of transforming found objects, and continually experimenting with materials, she layers references: to the mythological and scientific, secular and ritualistic, physical and psychological. At the centre of all works is the abstraction of shape and confluence of time in a provocative meeting of materials. 

Kher will be the first artist to continue a residency in conjunction with their exhibition, remaining in Somerset until December. A newly commissioned film based on the artist’s practice will be screened along side the show.

My Monster celebrates the 200th anniversary year of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and the enduring fascination with the human animal hybrid. 

Given the current biotechnological breakthroughs in creating human animal hybrids, we may be standing on the cusp of change when it comes to our species. The time has come to ask what a hybrid future might look like for both humans and animals. Hybrids are the ultimate metaphor for the outsider. Their very existence is a political act, an affront. Like monsters of old, they are harbingers of a future we may not like, but are intent on creating through each twist and tweak of our species through biotechnology.

Artists including AES+F (Russia), Jane Alexander (South Africa), Peter Booth, Jazmina Cininas, Kate Clark (USA), Catherine Clover, Beth Croce, Julia deVille, Heri Dono (ID), Peter Ellis, Rona Green, Ai Hasegawa (Japan), Moira Finucane, Deborah Kelly, Bharti  Kher (IND),  Deborah Klein, Oleg Kulik (Ukraine / Russia), Sam Leach, Norman Lindsay, Sidney Nolan,  Eko Nugroho (ID), Kira O'Reilly & Jennifer Willet (Ireland / Canada), Lisa Roet, Geoffrey Ricardo, Mithu Sen (IND), Maja Smrekar (Slovenia), Ronnie Van Hout (NZ) & (((20hz)))

Curator Evelyn Tsitas

“Facing India” examines the question of how one’s own national history, present, and future manifest themselves from a female point of view. In their multimedia works, Vibha Galhotra, Bharti Kher, Prajakta Potnis, Reena Saini Kallat, Mithu Sen, and Tejal Shah shift attention towards historical and contemporary conflicts. Poetic, metaphorical, and quiet, but also radical, direct, and loud — they question borders of all kinds, be these political, territorial, ecological, religious, social, personal, or gender-based. The history of these borders, their visibility and invisibility, their legitimacy, and not seldom their dissolution are the themes of the works presented in "Facing India". The exhibition focuses on six positions in order to present these more comprehensively. Socialised and educated in an increasingly globalised world, these women artists no longer limit their “border controls” solely to India, but rather reach out into other countries and continents. The state, society, and the individual, as well as questions regarding identity and the environment, are critically examined. Nevertheless, as broad as their range of topics may be, explicit and implicit references to the presence of the feminine and the position of women, as well as solidarity and empathy, are recurring themes throughout the exhibition.

For "Points de départ, points qui lient", a selection of bindi paintings will be on display at the Foundation, including the Heroides series (2016), which refers to Ovid’s The Heroides. This collection of epistolary poems is written in the voice of the heroines of Greek and Roman mythology, who address and respond to their lost, left, and imagined lovers. An ongoing series of map works that cover and mask Mercator world maps will also be exhibited for the first time. The application of bindis mark, scar, and punctuate territories and borders, questioning the north/south polarities of country and nation, as well as the visual misrepresentations of a European geodesy.

Also presented is the colossal work An absence of assignable cause (2007), an imagining of the anatomic heart of a blue sperm whale, made to scale and enveloped in a skin of bindis. At once the biggest heart in the world and an inquiry of love, this work offers the paradox of seeing with the inner eye into the heart of the other.

Taking place across Victoria Miro’s London galleries, this international, cross-generational exhibition is a celebration of women artists who have shaped and transformed, and continue to influence and expand, the language and definition of abstract painting.

New Delhi-based artist Bharti Kher’s practice is characterised by processes of assembly, juxtaposition and transformation. Often employing found objects that bear the traces of their own histories, she raises metaphysical questions about our relationship to life’s quotidian objects and its daily rituals. To these, she brings a sense of quest, in which the self – as a moral, sexual and cultural being – might be open to interpretation, projection and, even, shape-shifting. Kher’s work is not without a sense of magic realism: indeed, she has described her practice as ‘the hunt for a chimera’.

Throughout her career, Kher has deployed the bindi as a motif to animate and transform objects and surfaces. Applying them in great number to painted board, in Neurons and Noise, 2015, she creates a dynamic ‘painting’ that, bestriding Eastern and Western aesthetics, points to a wider sense of interconnectedness – between the micro and macro, and spiritual and material worlds.

- Martin Cooper

Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now) explores narratives of sculpture in which artists have sought to replicate the literal, living presence of the human body. On view exclusively at The Met Breuer, this major international loan exhibition of about 120 works draws on The Met's rich collections of European sculpture and modern and contemporary art, while also featuring a selection of important works from national and international museums and private collections.

Juxtaposing well-known masterpieces with surprising and little-seen works, the exhibition brings together sculptures by artists from Donatello, El Greco, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Antonio Canova, Auguste Rodin, and Edgar Degas to Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, Isa Genzken, Charles Ray, Fred Wilson, Robert Gober, Bharti Kher, Duane Hanson, Jeff Koons, and Yinka Shonibare MBE, as well as wax effigies, reliquaries, mannequins, and anatomical models. Together, these works highlight the continuing anxieties and pleasures attendant upon the three-dimensional simulation of the human body.

"Messengers" will include several large-scale paintings, in which bindis of different shapes and colors are incorporated into and onto a painted surface. These works utilize a variety of materials, which Kher readily admits is an important aspect of her work. Several of the pieces include media as diverse as wax, wood, cork, glass, and mirrors, all in a careful interplay with bindis, one of her signature materials. Sculptural works, and works on paper, in which the artist uses bindis as a mapping device, will also be included, making the exhibition a small but intimate display revealing key aspects of the artist’s focus.

There are hundreds of prominent sculpture parks scattered around the globe, this is the first significant one of its kind in India. The Sculpture Park, located at Madhavendra Palace, hosts 62 sculptures by 17 Indian and 7 international. Conceived and curated by Peter Nagy, owner of Nature Morte Gallery in Delhi, The Sculpture Park has turned the entire palace into an art gallery with sculptures displayed both in and outdoors. Monumental works will occupy central positions while more intimate works will be tucked away in nooks. Thus creating a treasure hunt for the visitor encountering sculpture in all its contemporary diversity in a wide variety of arrangements and displays.

The first edition of The Sculpture Park opened on December 10th, 2017 and will continue till November 2018.

Museum Frieder Burda I Salon Berlin is very pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Bharti Kher in Germany from 13 October 2017 to 17 February 2018. Born in London in 1969, the artist lives and works in Delhi since the early 1990s and is one of the most important international contemporary artists of her generation.

Bharti Kher not only combines different techniques, materials and media, but also male and female, animal and human, sacred and profane, tradition and technology. Just as her work is associated with alchemical or magical processes, it also conveys the notion that human identity is in constant transformation and construction. The core of her work is, as she emphasizes, the "hybridized, unruly, questioned, or even absent body."

Bharti Kher, 2015 Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner, was enriched and recharged by spending time thinking and living amongst the Museum's extraordinary building and art treasures. The focus of this show is a series of rawings and notebooks Kher made during that time. The drawings are very tactile, often provocative, and charged with humor and a capriciousness that is smart and girly at the same time. They reflect on gender and motherhood, anatomy, and the physiology of pregnancy. They speak of empathy and love while investigating the enigmatic paradoxes and ambiguities of what it means to be human.

In separate contexts, the participating artists have been recognized for their command of unconventional materials that bridge the fundamental qualities of 2D and 3D artworks. The results are abstract and cohesive, physical and psychological, sculptural and, occasionally, otherworldly.

Bharti Kher’s lion-headed ‘Warrior Bracelet’ (2016) is intended to both physically and emotionally transform the wearer. It is jewelry as talisman and protector; and by virtue of requiring the wearer to hold it in place via a concealed handle, it harkens to elements of performance. Kher has described this highly adorned gold-plated work as an empowering accessory, ‘a skin the shaman carries… Wear it to work and keep it in your bedroom for when you need to call into being your warrior.’