Let’s take this outside
Frieze Sculpture returns to Regent’s Park and the focus is on works by women. The tide is turning, says artist Bharti Kher
THE lawns of Regent’s Park are about to come alive with s t ra n ge a n d wo n d e r f u l forms. Frieze Sculpture, the 3D version of the autumn art fair is back. By next week works by artists from Tracey Emin and Conrad Shawcross to Elmgreen & Dragset will have sprung up between the trees.
One piece this year that will be hard to miss is 4.8 metre-high bronze from British-born artist Bharti Kher. She has made a name for herself in India, where she has been living for more than two decades with her partner Subodh Gupta, another well-known artist.
This piece is called Intermediaries. “It’s about the size of a two-storey house,” she says, almost laughing at the audacity of it. But it is not a house — it is three humanish figures. “I’d say it was a family portrait,” she says innocently. But it has a shamanistic tinge. “They are avatars of human psychology, the gods, the planets. They are djinns.”
They exist in spirit, but not quite in actuality yet. The foundry in Hampshire forging them is working to the 11th hour to get them right. Kher, 49, has a wellstamped passport and drops into town regularly “to quench my thirst for London” before shuttling off to Hampshire to see her spirits take form.
They are an extension of the first Intermediaries series — smaller clay and resin models that she started while on a residency with Hauser & Wirth in Somerset two years ago. The idea, though, needed another larger outing.
“I l i ke the idea that these [her Intermediaries] are the in-between people,” she says. “Right now I think it is quite poignant — half here, half there, somewhere here, somewhere there.”
Kher has something of the half-here, half-there about her as well. The British art scene wants to claim some part of her, even though she’s been based an hour south of Delhi with her husband for most of her career. But life started in Surrey and London: she’s an Epsom girl, daughter of Indian parents.
Her mother had a sari shop in Streatham — she recalls fondly time spent skating at Streatham ice rink —