Nature Morte is pleased to present a solo show of new works by Bharti Kher. Continuing to expand her repertoire of materials and references, the show is comprised mostly of new sculptures which relate to domestic spaces, responding to the interior architecture of the gallery itself. A staircase, a doorway, and a chair are isolated and re-imagined, installed to become apparitions of themselves or elements in a hallucinatory stage set. Kher’s sculptures now employ a complex dialogue between the found object and their manipulation through juxtapositions and various processes. She both excavates and destabilizes the inherent meanings found in common objects to arrive at poetic conjunctions that speak of social tensions and personal discoveries (for the viewer as much as for the artist herself).

Also on view will be the artist’s signature bindi works which occupy the space of painting yet expand upon its histories and possibilities. Now approaching a monumental scale, the works contrast minute detailing with an almost panoramic scope. One large diptych uses mirrors, smashed and violated, as its ground. Bindis applied on to this shattered reflective surface are subsumed into it, the work as a whole acts as a residual evidence of a performative catharsis. In another diptych, bindis are organized along a more formalized program, their geometric progressions relating to the warp and weft of woven carpets, the patterning of Islamic architecture, the molecular ordering of matter itself or the digitization of information and imagery.

Bharti Kher was born in London in 1969 and received a BA in Painting from the Newcastle Polytechnic in Newcastle, UK in 1991. She has been living and working in New Delhi since 1993. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Parasol unit in London, Hauser & Wirth in New York and Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong (all 2012). Her works have been included in group exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the MAXXI Museum, Rome; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.; the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mori Art Museum, both in Tokyo. Her works are in a number of museum collections including Tate Modern, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.