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Installation view of BHARTI KHER’s “A Wonderful Anarchy” at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset. Photo by Ken Adlard. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London / Somerset / New York / Los Angeles / Zürich / St Moritz / Gstaad / Hong Kong.
“A Wonderful Anarchy,” Bharti Kher’s solo show at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, asserted the artist’s irreverence. Goddess figures; ready-mades augmented with horns; urns; furniture; bindis; and notebook pages embellished with drawings were brought together and emptied of their conventional symbolism. The paintings, drawings, and sculptures on view are playful and perhaps also political, although Kher would be reluctant to concede this. Rather, she revels in ambiguity, and her work resists any fixed thesis. The show was commanding. The visual ambiguity of her works match their indeterminate logic.
Kher’s works were playfully arranged within the gallery. Suspended from the ceiling’s lattice of wooden beams was her awkwardly balanced sculpture A wonderful anarchy (2018), which lends its name to the exhibition and epitomizes her contrary and volatile approach to subject, form, and materials. Chains, chair legs, a wooden effigy, and a ladder intertwined with fabric swatches and yarn create a dynamic collage. The assemblage seems poised for movement but is tethered by a rope leash to a thick pillar. Its position on the cusp between stillness and mobility matches that of the outdoor sculpture The fallow (2019). Partly composed of an ambiguous female icon whose body morphs into a decorative half circle, this hybrid installation embodies a collision of themes, where mythology meets geometry, female divinity gives way to a shape symbolic of perpetual motion, and a seemingly Hindu deity is uprooted and made to absorb its lush surroundings. This agitation of forms and repurposing of conceptually loaded objects is characteristic of Kher’s work, although in the context of the capacious barn-like gallery, her whimsy is more pronounced.
The steady tempo and sense of tranquility created by the generous spacing of these works dissipated upon one’s encounter with The intermediaries (2019), a crowded mass of pseudo-mythological female figures stationed on cement plinths, atop stratifications of candy-colored wax or brass mounts. Their bodies are a fusion of forms, with multiple heads protruding from some, while others exhibit animal features or spawn fruits from their faces. The wax base complements the figures in accentuating their transitional states and appeals to Kher for the material’s chemical properties, being able to liquefy upon burning yet also return to its original solid state. At the same time, the scuffed paintwork and chipped clay on the figures simulate age, adding on years to the sculptural work.
While Kher is happy to manufacture time, she is also reverent to its passing through space. Virus X (2019), an impressive wall-based bindi painting is part of the ongoing Virus (2010– ) series, for which each coming year is marked by a similar painting accompanied by text predicting encounters and observations for that year. The process is meditative: each enlarged bindi, designed and created in fabric especially for Kher by craftspeople, is individually placed within a pulsating spiral while the concentric green circles appear to contort into the wall, seemingly spinning as if ready to expand into infinite space.
Installation view of BHARTI KHER’s Consummate joy and a Sisyphean task (front), 2019, wood, copper, steel, red jasper stone, 247 × 66.9 × 200 cm; and Virus X (back), 2019, mahogany wood, brass, bindis, ribbon, leather, 360 cm diameter and 30.5 × 46 × 35.5 cm, at “A Wonderful Anarchy,” Hauser & Wirth, Somerset. Photo by Ken Adlard. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London / Somerset / New York / Los Angeles / Zürich / St Moritz / Gstaad / Hong Kong.
For Kher, meaning seems to hang in the balance, as emphasized in a second assemblage, Consummate joy and Sisyphean task (2019), an assortment of objects precariously arranged around a suspended hollow wooden circle. This recurring geometric shape, and in particular the bindi, has become a lexicon for the artist, representing the unbounded. As the artist states, this imaginative visual language gives her space to speak of multiplicities, contradictions and coherences. Without interpretive guidance from the artist, her work is all the more appealing. It is light, it is heavy, and in its allusiveness lies its strength.
Bharti Kher’s “A Wonderful Anarchy” is on view at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, until January 5, 2020.
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