Bharti Kher

Bharti Kher (*1969) was born in London and has lived and worked in New Delhi since the early 1990s. Her practice moves between sculpture, painting, and installation, exploring the shifting nature of symbols across different cultural and geographical contexts. She has long engaged with questions of identity, gender, and belief, combining a strong material presence with striking visual intensity. 

A central element of her visual language is the bindi, the traditional mark worn on the forehead, which she removes from its original context and employs as an autonomous artistic element. Through layering and repetition, she creates expansive structures reminiscent of organic surfaces or maps, oscillating between ornament and abstraction, intimacy and monumentality. Her sculptural works often feature hybrid figures captured in transitional states, suggesting both vulnerability and resilience. 

Her monumental sculpture The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own is considered one of the defining works of her generation. Bharti Kher’s work has been presented at institutions such as Tate in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, and is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. In 2015, she was awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.