New York
Hauser & Wirth
Born in London, living in Delhi for 20 years, Bharti Kher creates powerful conceptual works that draw on different aspects of her personal experience. Often multivalent in presentation, her symbolic, sometimes allegorical sculptures incorporate old and new themes, enlarging myth and legend through visual tropes that engage our freer speculations. The title of her recent show, “The hot winds that blow from the West,” refers to the intensely hot winds that cross North India and Pakistan during the summer. Kher sees these winds, which originate in places of power from the last century, as lacking in force and, to some extent, in ethical value. Her constructions support a female mythology of considerable imagination, most visible in The messenger (2011), a cast fiberglass figure characterized by Kher as an urban witch, though there is also a connection to the Hindu goddess Dakini, known as the materialization of female spiritual force. …see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
