Bharti Kher

The Intermediary Family, 2018

Bharti Kher (Indian, born 1969), The Intermediary Family, 2018, bronze, 189 Ă— 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Bharti Kher (Indian, born 1969), The Intermediary Family, 2018, bronze, 189 Ă— 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Bharti Kher (Indian, born 1969), The Intermediary Family, 2018, bronze, 189 Ă— 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Bharti Kher (Indian, born 1969), The Intermediary Family, 2018, bronze, 189 Ă— 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Bharti Kher (Indian, born 1969), The Intermediary Family, 2018, bronze, 189 Ă— 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Bharti Kher (Indian, born 1969), The Intermediary Family, 2018, bronze, 189 Ă— 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Bharti Kher (Indian, born 1969), The Intermediary Family, 2018, bronze, 189 Ă— 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Born in London, Bharti Kher lives and works in New Delhi, India. Kher works in a variety of media, creating paintings, sculptures, ready-made objects, and installations, and has been inspired by a range of artists, from Meret Oppenheim to Louise Bourgeois. Her surrealistic works explore such themes as identity and gender, and her hybrid sculptures are often composed of half-female forms. As Kanu Agrawal has written, in Kher's works the “distinctions between humans and nature, ecology and politics are blurred,” and “morphing is a survival technique,” and a way “to resist old patriarchal regimes and to invent new hybrid worlds and hybrid creations.” Her sculpture The Intermediary Family of 2018 is based on a group of small clay objects from South India. For Kher, the objects “represent an entire range and source of life—from animals to gods to the secular.” To make this work, she broke apart the clay figures and then fused them together into fresh configurations, resulting in “new avatars.” These then became the basis for her monumental bronze The Intermediary Family. This sculpture was first exhibited at Frieze Sculpture in 2018, and will be on view at Harvard Business School through March of 2020 as part of the exhibition supported by the C. Ludens Ringnes Sculpture Collection.

Bharti Kher has participated in numerous international exhibitions since 1990, with solo exhibitions at Kukje Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; Nature Morte, New Delhi, India, 2013; Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary art, London; and Savannah College for Art and Design in Georgia. Her works can be found in public and private collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tate Modern, London; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, and François Pinault Collection, Paris. She is represented by Hauser & Wirth.