Bhupen Khakhar packs a punch

By Lowenna Waters

With the sun-drenched colours of Indian streets, melancholic male figures, and weird, magical-realist dreamscapes, Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings are personal, political, masculine and erotic. Born in Mumbai in 1934, he trained as a chartered accountant before being persuaded by the painter Gulam Mohammed Sheikh to study art criticism in Baroda, Gujarat. He attended lectures on European painting, and when he became a painter himself he combined the broken perspective of Cézanne, the paintbox-bright colours of Matisse and the faux-naive figures of the primitivist Henri Rousseau.

A new exhibition at Tate Modern in London, “You Can’t Please All”, is the first retrospective of his work since his death in 2003, and spans his 50-year career. In the first room we see him developing his visual language. He began by experimenting in collage before moving on to large-scale canvases inspired by scenes of day-to-day life in Baroda, combining miniature details with grand, acid-bright backgrounds. In “Factory Strike (Voice of Freedom)”, from 1972, half-formed characters with hollow eyes wave flags, their factory plant cordoned off in hot pink. His fascination with India’s workers is the subject of a part of the show called “The Insignificant Man”, which includes pictures of a window cleaner, a barber, a watchmaker and a tailor.