You Think You Know Bharti Kher? Think Again—This Artist Won’t Be Pinned Down

Bharti Kher has built a career on her refusal to be defined. Under a sketch in her notebook, she once wrote: “You think you know me, but you don’t.” The provocation rings true in “The Sun Splitting Stones” at Perrotin in Paris, on view through Dec. 20, where she reintroduces herself with a little help from oil pastels, wooden boards, and a return to painting.

Across the artist’s oeuvre, one will find larger-than-life clay forms, abstracted bodies, and wall-spanning compositions shown over 20 years by institutions including New York’s Public Art Fund, Yorkshire Sculpture Park between Leeds and Sheffield, the Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen, and Hayward Gallery in London. 

Created in the stillness of the Covid pandemic, the works in “The Sun Splitting Stones” mark Kher’s recent pivot from focusing on sculpture to painting—a medium that “called me back to her… in my dreams mostly, and the days I stayed in bed,” she shares. Taking sanctuary in her New Delhi studio, she laid a selection of empty teak panels flat on the ground, strategically turning the round surfaces (known as “tondo” in Renaissance-era nomenclature) to let the paint drip and weave in unpredictable directions.

The format’s circular geometry echoes the silhouettes of Kher’s “Virus” works and regularly employed bindis—symbols of the third eye that open inward, toward intuition and unseen energies. Throughout the exhibition, the circle serves as a steady, grounding motif for Kher’s more ambitious metaphors.

In her “Weather Paintings” series, spirals and egg-like rotundities swell with bright color and sweeping grace, while vibrant triangles—representing the balance of Shiva and Shakti, masculine and feminine forces—fuse cosmology with scientific principle, as the language of cells and galaxies cohabitate on the canvas.

The exhibition is Kher’s most comprehensive presentation of paintings to date—elucidating how the artist has evolved since her last brush with the medium. But at Perrotin, Kher is as stubborn as ever in the face of new and old audiences alike. “Make no sense,” she demands. “Confuse and convince equally.”