In September, Bharti Kher installed Ancestor, a monumental statue of a hybrid female deity, in New York’s Central Park. Five and a half metres tall, cast in bronze, it is the London-born, New Delhi-based artist’s largest and most publicly visible work. As this exhibition demonstrates, however, sometimes small gestures can pack more power than a public monument. At times, this apparent whisper of a show roars with justified fury.
Kher has a distinctive material language using self-adhesive felt bindis – coloured dots or shapes worn on the forehead – as readymades. She builds up pictures with them, both in rhythmic patterns like a secret language, or globular abstractions like bacteria viewed under a microscope. Large bindi works line the Arnolfini’s upper gallery – rich and handsome pieces, mesmerising in their simple use of repeating shapes. In several works, seductive matt felt is set against a layer of sparkly or metallic paint. The simplest of these play with optical effects, but Kher achieves surprising complexity with apparently limited means: not pointillism exactly, but something more scientific and atomised.
