BHARTI KHER: THE SUN SPLITTING STONES

PERROTIN Paris is pleased to present The Sun Splitting Stones, Bharti Kher’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery.

October 18 — December 20, 2025

For more than twenty years, the artist has developed a singular practice combining sculpture, installation, and painting, nourished by reflections on the body, memory, and myth. After a long period devoted primarily to sculpture, she now returns to painting, rediscovering a medium that is both intimate and powerful, whose symbolic and spiritual dimensions she explores. In recent years, Bharti Kher has been the subject of major exhibitions, notably with Public Art Fund (New York), at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK) and currently at the Thorvaldsens Museum (Copenhagen) and Hayward Gallery (London).

Underneath a drawing in her sketchbook Kher has written emphatically: “you think you know me but you don’t”. Like the hybrid women and goddesses she portrays, the artist is a shapeshifter. She renounces certainty, constantly yearning for new, expansive understandings and ways of seeing in a practice that is non-linear, snaking, and often orbiting back to ideas sparked years previously. There is a restlessness, a refusal to be pinned down or narrowly defined. For over twenty years Kher has explored, stretched and exhausted the potential of manifold materials in her sculpture, moving between figuration and abstraction, minimalism and maximalism, and embracing modelling, casting, and assemblage from intimate to monumental scales. Across the same period, she has evolved a sophisticated, vehemently singular visual language in her renowned bindi works.

Kher often speaks of her contradictory nature. Another note, in a list under the heading Can I Think of a Manifesto, states: “Make no sense. Confuse and convince equally”. Her latest pivot towards paintings may at first appear anomalous, but in fact marks a journey of return, after a hiatus of over two decades. Trained as a painter in the UK, Kher was making large-scale canvases before she moved to Delhi in her early twenties. Once in India, her painting practice continued for a time, though she grew increasingly disconnected from it. She found that sculpture offered a more direct way to engage outwardly with the physicality of her new context through found objects that held its narratives within them. Since 2000, painting had lain dormant within her.