Perrotin Paris is pleased to present The Sun Splitting Stones, Bharti Kher’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery. For more than twenty years, the artist has developed a singular practice combining sculpture, installation, and painting, nourished by reflections on the body, memory, and myth. After a long period devoted primarily to sculpture, she now returns to painting, rediscovering a medium that is both intimate and powerful, whose symbolic and spiritual dimensions she explores. In recent years, Bharti Kher has been the subject of major exhibitions, notably with Public Art Fund (New York), at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK) and currently at the Thorvaldsens Museum (Copenhagen) and Hayward Gallery (London).
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite
Underneath a drawing in her sketchbook Kher has written emphatically: “you think you know me but you don’t”1. Like the hybrid women and goddesses she portrays, the artist is a shapeshifter. She renounces certainty, constantly yearning for new, expansive understandings and ways of seeing in a practice that is non-linear, snaking, and often orbiting back to ideas sparked years previously. There is a restlessness, a refusal to be pinned down or narrowly defined. For over twenty years Kher has explored, stretched and exhausted the potential of manifold materials in her sculpture, moving between figuration and abstraction, minimalism and maximalism, and embracing modelling, casting, and assemblage from intimate to monumental scales. Across the same period, she has evolved a sophisticated, vehemently singular visual language in her renowned bindi works.
1- Reproduced in Aveek Sen, ed., Bharti Kher: Sketchbooks, Diaries and Works on Paper. 2022, New Delhi: Nature Morte. Pg 75.
Kher often speaks of her contradictory nature. Another note, in a list under the heading Can I Think of a Manifesto, states: “Make no sense. Confuse and convince equally”2.Her latest pivot towards paintings may at first appear anomalous, but in fact marks a journey of return, after a hiatus of over two decades. Trained as a painter in the UK, Kher was making large-scale canvases before she moved to Delhi in her early twenties. Once in India, her painting practice continued for a time, though she grew increasingly disconnected from it. She found that sculpture offered a more direct way to engage outwardly with the physicality of her new context through found objects that held its narratives within them. Since 2000, painting had lain dormant within her.
2- Reproduced in Aveek Sen, ed., Bharti Kher: Sketchbooks, Diaries and Works on Paper. 2022, New Delhi: Nature Morte. Pg 84
Following the Covid pandemic, Kher found herself in an unfamiliar place of darkness, whose shadow weighed heavy, quelling her characteristic fire. Residing deep in the muscle memory of her body, it was painting that offered her a pathway through this malaise. The artist describes how “painting called me back to her. In my dreams mostly and the days I stayed in bed”. These dreams were vivid and visceral, with a clear sense of shape, space and distinct colour, as though works were somehow forming in her subconscious.
The sensation of painting played out within the inner self ultimately broke a spell in the external world. Offering a counterpoint to the heavy and collaborative work of making sculpture, the intimate, solitary nature of painting was restorative. Like land renewing itself after lying fallow, Kher returned to the medium as a healing and fertile space in which to germinate new possibilities. This experience echoes a pivotal method of her practice: the artist breaks things in order to know them better, a process which she says is “about confronting fear, about dealing with the unknown and perhaps looking at fragility as a way forward”3.
3- Aveek Sen, ed., Bharti Kher: Sketchbooks, Diaries and Works on Paper. 2022, New Delhi: Nature Morte. Pg 63
This exhibition is the most significant to date of Kher’s subsequent paintings, shown alongside a group of sculptures to which they are fundamentally connected and resonate with on formal and conceptual levels. Moving across two and three dimensions, she explores different manifestations of presence and absence, the framework of connection between the body’s internal and external existence. Symbols, codes and energies flow and seep between mediums, until they feel indivisible from one another: two sides of the same coin. Like ciphers or portals, the sculptures act as a bridge into the paintings, envisioning the space within and around them.
The tondo format of several paintings mirrors the circular shape of Kher’s Virus works and bindis through the symbolism of the third eye, turning towards the inner world to offer sight beyond the physical. It also suggests the view through a microscope: operating on a macro and micro level, these paintings can be read as cells or galaxies. Regardless of the plane of focus, the works extend Kher’s search for ways to achieve mimesis, which she describes as a synergy between external reality and our vital internal forces. The exhibition title – The Sun Splitting Stones – relates to the power and potential of that which is felt but not seen, the capacity of a feeling or sensation to have a material impact even on seemingly impenetrable matter.
Kher’s exploration of space in the Weather paintings extends this meditation on the relationship between the tangible and intangible, relating to her animist beliefs that objects are not inert but have a spiritual essence, their energy vibrating and connecting to one another and to us. The sculptures are an embodied expression of this concept, whereas the paintings visualise how the space between physical entities is activated, representing immaterial impulses in constant motion. This is keenly felt in the powerful relationship between East of the sun and west of the moon and Weather painting: The sun splitting stones. In both works a strong vertical emphasis acts as an anchor, with a balanced horizontal form lending precarity in a physical and an emotional sense, navigating the liminal zone between order and chaos. The interplay of colours is as crucial as the formal relationships. As with all Kher’s balance sculptures, where some objects appear to float and others have heft and perform a grounding function, so the paintings find their equilibrium. Yet the effect is never one of stasis. Rising from a dark, earthy ground, the vivid coloured shapes of The sun splitting stones hover and vibrate, whilst bold, arcing strokes direct movement. Some forms ooze and spill with a bodily rawness, others have a lightness and ethereality.
Connecting to these notions, Frailty of Heart marks an early exploration of assemblage and balance that brings together the tactile and volumetric qualities of disparate objects. It also emphasises the potential of one element or line to create tension or contrast, whether in painting or sculpture. Kher’s use of a bra covered in resin, glistening and brittle, holds a charge in relation to the female body and its fetishisation.
The Weather paintings quarry the depths of our emotional and spiritual terrain. They are internal landscapes of fluidity and transformation that speak of our pluralism, our potential to be many things and in many states at once – changeable, unpredictable. Their diversity of emotional timbre and tone is palpable as Kher traverses the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Weather painting: mother’s fury is raw and tumultuous, its fierce red signalling danger and bisected by a vigorous form that resembles a lightning strike. It epitomises the Tantric spirit of Kher’s iconic sculpture And all the while the benevolent slept which depicts the ferocious goddess Kali, who is associated with cycles of destruction and creation. From fire to water, fluidity and the movement of liquids across membranes also play an important role in the series.
Weather painting: blood in deep water relates to the fact that in deep water blood appears green rather than red. Exploring transformation and perception, this moving work also evokes a body adrift, held by and bleeding into the body of the sea. Kher characteristically presents an image of a non-sanitised body, with the reality of its fluids and secretions. In the painting, alongside forms that resemble organs and tracts is a prominent inverted triangle, symbolic both of the vulva and the alchemical symbol for water.
Kher’s coded visual language is reminiscent of Hilma af Kilnt and Ithell Colquhoun, two prophetic women artists who shared her passion for magic and alchemy. Shapes and symbols that repeat across these new paintings find echoes in her wider practice, drawing on sacred geometry and ancient symbolism, such as the circle as cosmos, the divine realm, the coiled spiral form of Kundalini, the eternal completeness of ouroboros, and the chakras. Orb-like forms create nodal sites of energy that could be cells, eggs ripe with life, or the world in microcosm. These shapes find direct formal and symbolic parallels in the sculptures: the swelling potential of the cast pregnant belly in Stone, Paper, Scissors; the orb of The alchemist; the green quartz of East of the sun and west of the moon. Sourced from Jaipur, the stones Kher uses in her sculptures are not simply beautiful ancient objects, they stand for the energy of the earth, the memory of fire and magma that represents the ultimate transformation from one state of being to another.
An accumulation of vibrant interlocking triangles in Weather painting: the hunger creates a similarly intense point of focus that calls to mind yantras, used in Tantric tradition as instruments of meditation and visualisation through which to connect to cosmic and divine energies. Clusters of brightly coloured bindis on the upright form of East of the sun and west of the moon distil a similar energy. Triangles feature in the majority of Kher’s new body of paintings. Pointing upwards they can represent the masculine (Shiva) and downwards the feminine (Shakti), their combination symbolising the melding of those forces, which is an intersection often explored by Kher. In alchemical symbolism they also denote fire and water.
Allied to her use of shape, Kher’s mark making across the Weather paintings demonstrates an extraordinary range, and results in highly dynamic surfaces. From bold assured strokes, textured, fleshy drips and daubs, frenetic, scribbled scratching back of the surface, to oil pastel highlights, these contrasts add to a sense of push and pull. This is something that Kher often refers to in her sculptures as a ‘grist’, a texture, a resistance. Her confidence in the handling of paint emanates from the same mastery that defines her wider use of materials.
In the same organic way she approaches sculpture, Kher works on several paintings simultaneously, enabling her to move between them and allowing symbiotic conversations to develop over time. Her need to shift perspective and involve the motion of her body also comes into play. She will often place the board or canvas flat on the floor or rotate it so that the movement of paint appears to defy gravity and drips run upwards creating a disconcerting, shifting sense of space, as in Void of order and Intricacies of ecosystems. As she coaxes all her materials to behave in ways they do not naturally, so her alchemical touch is applied to paint. The deep teak boards have a sculptural quality in themselves, emphasised by the way the impasto paint sits on the surface like a skin.
Colour plays a vital and unifying role in the artist’s practice, across drawing, painting and sculpture. Her palette is broad, seductive and unmistakably hers. Its richness resonates across mediums, in the saris she uses, the hand-dyed bindis, or the wax of the Intermediaries and Stone, Paper, Scissors. In the Weather paintings, colour establishes the emotional tenor and energy of the work, embracing a range that passes from the fiery intensity of Mother’s Fury to the brooding darkness of Void of Order. Kher’s approach to colour places her within a trajectory of thinking about its capacity to elicit psychological and spiritual response. This extends from Goethe’s belief that colour’s effects are “associated with the emotions of the mind4” into Kandinsky’s work on how colour and shape within abstraction not only evoke but also describe internal experience. However, in the sphere of thinkers on colour, Kher resonates on a deeper level with Ithell Colquhoun, whose fascination with animism, occultism and esoteric philosophies led to a more textured, embodied and expansive approach: to Colquhoun, colour was an entity in and of itself as well as a route to transcendence. Similarly, Kher speaks of being able to see and feel the spirt of colour. In these paintings, colour has an objecthood and presence that emanates from this core belief.
There is an alchemy in the manipulation of colour in the Weather paintings that is not always comfortable. Indeed, the purposeful creation of discomfort and challenge is characteristic of Kher. The tondo works in particular have a potency that lies in their dark grounds, creating immeasurable space that suggests alternate planes and dimensions. In Weather painting: the hunger rising starkly like the visions of her dreams are vivid, almost fluorescent forms of acid green, pink and yellow that contrast with rather than complement one another. This bears an interesting relationship to Colquhoun’s Taro series (1977), works in which used orbs of bold pigment were set against opposing colours in order to achieve vibrations that would lead to spiritual enlightenment5.
At the conceptual heart of this exhibition stands The alchemist. A sculpture considered by Kher to be a form of self-portrait, she is symbolic of magic and transformation, a transmitter and receiver of energy. She holds the interconnected threads that weave through the works in this exhibition. Fleet of foot, shamanistic, and bestowed with the qualities of the animal whose skin she carries, she beguiles, captivates and sings songs of experience.
Text by Sarah Coulson, Senior Curator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
4- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours. 1970, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press. Pg 304
5- Amy Hale, « The Promise of the Occult Future: Contextualising Ithell Colquhoun’s Spiritual Technologies » in Katy Norris (éd.), Ithell Colquhoun : Between Worlds, Londres, Tate, 2025, p. 177-178.
Born in 1969 in London, UK.
Lives and works between London, UK and New Delhi, India.
Bharti Kher’s oeuvre spans 25 years and includes paintings, sculptures and installations. Throughout her practice she has displayed an unwavering relationship with animism surrealism and the nature of things as we experience the world. Inspired by a wide range of sources and making practices, she employs readymades and material in wide arc of meaning and transformation. Kher’s works often appear to move energetically. Using counterpoint and contradiction as visual tools, her chimeras, mythical monsters, and allegorical works combine references that are at once topical and traditional, political and poetic.
Kher studied her Foundation Course in Art and Design at Middlesex Polytechnic London, and received a fine art BA in painting, with honors. at Newcastle Polytechnic, United Kingdom. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and has been included in scores of group exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide.
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