Bhupen Khakhar was born in 1934 in Bombay. In the 1980s, Khakhar came out as a gay man and painted a series of iconic works such as You Can’t Please All (1981). These paintings were among the first in India to delve into themes of relationships between men and societal taboos around homosexuality. Fishermen in Goa (1985) depicts a group of three men – one fully dressed, another in a vest, and the third naked. It is an example of the fetishisation of the sexualised male body through gesture and metaphors, such as the fish that the man in the centre holds in one hand, while his other hand reaches under his companion’s shirt. The large figures in the foreground and the thickly worked pigment are typical of Khakhar’s style during this period. Khakhar’s work has been widely exhibited internationally in group shows in London, Paris, Kassel, Amsterdam, New York, and Tokyo.
This is the first time the work of Bhupen Khakhar is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Latika Gupta
