✦ Celebrity stories, facts and career updates. Explore F4U now →

Home › Biography › Bharti Kher,

Bharti Kher, biographyFeatured Biography

Image source: StarsUnfolded

Celebrities

Bharti Kher, Biography: Age, Career, Family and More

F4U Editorial Desk • Updated September 28, 2026 • 6 min read

Quick Info

Age54 Years

BirthplaceDelhi

ProfessionArtist

SpouseSubodh Gupta (artist)

Bharti Kher, Biography

Bharti Kher is a Delhi-born artist known for large-scale sculptures, installations, paintings and distinctive work with bindis and sarees. Over a career of

Early life and background

Bharti Kher was born and raised in Delhi. She is 54 years old and is married to fellow artist Subodh Gupta. Physically, she is described as approximately 1.67 m (5'6") tall with black hair and black eyes.

Career

Kher has built a reputation as a multidisciplinary contemporary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, mirror work and textile-based pieces. Across more than two decades she has developed a strong visual language that repeatedly returns to the bindi as a central motif. For Kher the bindi functions as more than decoration: she treats it as a material and a system of meaning, using its concentrated point to direct the viewer’s gaze and to operate as a kind of skin or membrane in her works.

Her projects often explore transformation, identity and the body. One recurring strand in her work, titled Intermediaries, assembles readymade coloured clay figurines — human, animal and object forms — to create hybrid groupings that reconfigure narrative and meaning. She has produced numerous works in this vein, including pieces from 2016 through 2020 such as Ardhanarishvara (2016), The Intermediary Family (2018), The offspring of a deity perhaps (2019) and Yes no (2020).

Another important theme for Kher addresses women and the body. She creates plaster figures and also uses garments and adornments associated with Indian womanhood. Her saree-based portraits use resin-dipped sarees molded and folded around structural supports like cement pillars, chairs and staircases to suggest presence through absence. Works connected to this interest include the Hybrid series (2004), Mrs Hera Moon (2006), Arione’s sister (2006), Lady with an Ermine (2012) and Six Women (2013–15).

Kher’s engagement with the bindi motif appears across multiple bodies of work. Examples noted in her recent output include series and pieces such as Code, cell, grid (2013), Dark Matter MM (2015), Maps (2015–17), Formless connections (2016) and the Future Is Not Fixed series (2020).

Exhibitions and major shows

Bharti Kher has mounted solo exhibitions and participated in group shows around the world. Her solo shows began in the 1990s and include early presentations at venues such as AIFACS and Art Heritage in New Delhi and Galerie F.I.A in Amsterdam. She has shown widely since then, with notable solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions including Bose Pacia Modern in New York (2000), Gallery Chemould in Mumbai (2001), Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Nature Morte in New Delhi (2007), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris (2008 and later years), Hauser & Wirth in London and New York (2010, 2012), Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong (2012), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (2015 and 2017), Vancouver Art Gallery (2016), Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai (2014) and Museum Frieder Burda Salon Berlin (2017).

Her work has also been included in group exhibitions and biennales internationally since the early 1990s. These group shows span venues in London, Tokyo, Geneva, Brisbane, Lille, Beijing, New York, Milan, Seoul, Tokyo, Paris and other cities, and include thematic and curated exhibitions such as Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery in London and exhibitions at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Busan Biennale.

Public profile

Kher is widely recognised for the visual consistency of her practice and for the conceptual frameworks she brings to material questions of adornment, gender and form. Critics and curators have shown sustained interest in how she converts familiar objects and markers of cultural identity into structurally and visually complex artworks that ask viewers to re-evaluate presence, narration and legibility.

Latest updates

Recent exhibitions listed include “Strange Attractors” at Nature Morte in New Delhi (2021) and an upcoming public presentation titled “Ancestor” for the Public Art Fund at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York, scheduled for 2022. Her ongoing series and projects remain focused on bindis, intermediaries and textile portraits, with work from 2019–2020 reflecting those continuities.
◈

Recent Work

Future is not fixed (series)

2020
Yes no

From the Intermediaries series, using assembled coloured clay figurines

2020
The Fallow

From the Intermediaries series

2019
Talisman

From the Intermediaries series

2019
✦

Career Highlights

  1. Developed a signature use of the bindi as a central motif across multiple media
  2. Intermediaries series that reconfigures readymade figurines into hybrid sculptures
  3. Saree-based portraits and textile works that explore presence and absence
  4. Solo exhibitions at major institutions and galleries worldwide including Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Galerie Perrotin and Vancouver Art Gallery
?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Bharti Kher, known for?

Artist

Who is Bharti Kher, married to?

Subodh Gupta (artist)