Work by Bharti Kher is currently on display in an online exhibition at Perrotin, New York. The Unexpected Freedom of Chaos is the artist’s first New York based exhibition in eight years, and brings together a number of important threads from the artist’s practice. The exhibition can be visited in an online tour; an interview with the artist introducing the show can be seen on the same page. 

The Unexpected Freedom of Chaos continues Kher’s ongoing fascination with how the psychological shapes, and is shaped by the corporeal and the material. The works on display are emblems of duality, fragmentation and hybridity. 

The exhibition began, Kher said in her video, with the mutually-dependent actions of break and repair; actions which have been central to her studio practice for many years.

“I break things to know them, and what I’m interested in is opening up material to discover and reveal something that is not apparent when something is whole.” - Bharti Kher

Kher’s integration of the bindi into sculpture appears several times in the exhibition - for example in Gentle Bitch (2020), one of five new works featuring the motif, in which the artist covers a shattered mirror with bindis, and in a 2010 work from Kher’s ongoing project, Virus, an intricate spiral of overlapping bindis. 

Detail from Gentle Bitch (2020)

Detail from Virus (2010)

Also on display are a number of sculptural works from Kher’s Intermediaries series, which splices broken objects to create new forms which pin together dualities - the mortal and the immortal, the material and the spiritual, the mundane and the divine. As well as these dualities, the works communicate the artists’ interest in the point at which the psychological and the material meet, and add new hybrid entities to Kher’s world, populated as it is by complex and indefinible beings. 

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Explore The Unexpected Freedom of Chaos on the Perrotin Gallery website. Images courtesy of Perrotin.