From Sculpture Back to the Brush: Bharti Kher’s Return to Painting

After more than three decades of primarily working in sculpture and large-scale installations, Bharti Kher is making a significant return to painting with her new exhibition, "The Sun Splitting Stones" at a Galerie in Paris. The exhibition will be held from October 18 to December 20, 2025. Bharti Kher’s re-engagement with painting marks not just a shift in medium, but a deeply personal and conceptual one; one that reflects introspection, renewal and the reawakening of a medium she once left behind.

From Painting to Sculpture and Back

Bharti Kher initially trained as a painter: born in London in 1969, she studied fine art painting in the UK. After moving to New Delhi in the early 1990s, her practice gradually shifted toward sculpture, found-objects, installations and her signature “bindi” works. For around twenty years, painting took a backseat in her studio. According to one account, “painting had lain dormant within her since 2000.” Then, in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic in particular, painting returned as a medium of refuge and exploration for her:

“Painting called me back to her. In my dreams mostly and the days I stayed in bed.”

Thus, the return to paint is both an echo of her early training and a new body of work rooted in a mature artistic voice.

The New Work: Context & Themes

In The Sun Splitting Stones, Bharti Kher presents a suite of large-scale oil paintings alongside selected sculptures. Some key thematic strands:

• Body, energy and internal space: Kher remarks that the shift to painting allowed her to probe her interior world “a very internal space, the inner workings of the body.”
• Material & mythic resonance: The title work evokes “the image of the sun penetrating something as impenetrable as rock or stone,” as a metaphor for transformation.
• Symbolism of circle and tondo shape: Several paintings adopt a circular (tondo) format, referencing her earlier bindis and suggesting both microcosm (cells) and macrocosm (galaxies).
• Colour, vibration and discomfort: The works are bold in colour and dynamic in form, Kher says she loves colour and “breaks all the rules” of it.
• Animism and the unseen: Her sculptures have often embodied the belief that objects are alive; in these paintings she explores the space between things, the “immaterial impulses in constant motion”.

Why It Matters

This return to painting is significant for several reasons:

• It marks a material shift in Kher’s practice: from large sculptural forms and installations back to canvases and board, a more intimate and direct medium.
• It reveals a conceptual evolution: while her earlier works addressed body, identity, objecthood and cultural ritual, this new work draws in meditations on interiority, energy and transformation.
• For the art world, it signals that Kher, already established and recognised, is not content to stay in one lane, she continues to evolve and challenge expectations. As one piece put it: “You think you know me? Think again”.

In Perspective

While many artists revisit earlier modes, Bharti Kher’s painting doesn’t feel like a nostalgic re-run, it feels urgent, present and forward-looking. In her words: “I’m kind of creating spaces for myself to enter this new language of making work again”.  For collectors, critics and art-lovers in India and beyond, this body of work positions Bharti Kher not just as a sculptor who once painted, but as a multi-modal artist who continues to drive her practice into new terrain