Retail Plus Chennai
Continuing the bullish trend in contemporary art sales Sotheby’s London recorded yet another successful auction recently. Among the impressive results was Bharti Kher’s life-sized female Indian elephant sculpture – The Skin Speaks a Language not its Own – that established not only a record for the artist but also a new record for any work by a contemporary female Indian artist at an auction. The 142 x 456.2 x 195 cm masterpiece sold for INR 7.1 crores (£993,250 or USD 1.5 million).
In this work that took ten months to create in her Gurgaon studio, Bharti focused on every fold and recess of the sunken pachyderm form and meticulously contoured it in intricately arranged patterns of thousands of “bindis” that organically swarm across the beast in a second skin.
The interesting twist is that Bharti’s bindis are sperm-shaped and on close observation one sees millions of swimming images that constitute a tired elephant about to recline. The artist easily combines two recognised, but powerful symbols of India – the Indian bindi and the Indian elephant. Her other well-known colourful bindi arrangement on a painted board is “Untitled” and adorns a gallery in the UK.
Emphasizing the importance of this sculpture, Director and Head of Sotheby’s Indian Art Department, Zara Porter-Hill said, “Despite our familiarity with elephants, nothing prepares the viewer for the emotional experience of seeing Bharti Kher’s elephant – huge and incongruous in the gallery space. With her head resting on her front foot, she is brought down to our level and the glassy black eye entreats a communion and proximity rarely encountered in the wild.”
Forty-year-old, Bharti was born in London, England, studied at the Middlesex Polytechnic, Cat Hill, London and did her B.A. Honours in Fine Art and Painting at Newcastle Polytechnic. Interestingly, Bharti’s is a reverse case of the émigré moving to India from the UK at age 23. The Indian milieu of having been in Delhi since 1993 has undoubtedly helped Bharti excel in her chosen endeavour though admittedly, in today’s global art marketplace where one pitches one’s tent is perhaps irrelevant.
The fact that she is married to renowned artist Subodh Gupta, known for his unique stainless utensils art, is perhaps incidental.
(A New York based independent trend writer, Raj S. Rangarajan reports on the art market and auto shows and reviews films for media based in New York; Toronto, Canada; Seoul, Korea and India.)
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RAJ S RANGARAJAN
