Bharti Kher’s oeuvre spans more than two decades and includes paintings, sculptures and installations. Throughout her practice she has displayed an unwavering relationship with surrealism, narrative, and the nature of things. Inspired by a wide range of sources and making practices, she employs the readymade in wide arc of meaning and transformation. Kher’s works thus appear to move through time, using reference as a counterpoint and contradiction as a visual tool. Her chimeras, mythical monsters, and allegorical tales combine references that are at once topical and traditional, political and poetic.
A Consummate Joy comprises new and recent works, ranging from sculpture, painting, installation and watercolours, and the latest annual edition of a 30-year project which began in 2010, Virus XI (2020). 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 on the significance of showing her work in Ireland said “Ireland has always been an interest for me in its similarities to ancient Indian history and mythologies; from the worship of pagan goddesses to the practice of oral storytelling and song”.
At the centre of Kher’s practice are her sculptures, early examples of which featured fantastical hybrid characters, blurring the distinctions between humans and nature, ecology and politics. In line with this early practice, Kher continues to assemble, juxtapose and transform found objects that are witness to their own histories.
until January 17, 2021
