Bhupen Khakhar

Born in Bombay in 1934, the artist Bhupen Khakhar was active in India from the late 1960s. A gentle radical, his luminous paintings addressed issues of class, gender and sexuality with sensitive, often tragicomic nuance. The first important publication on Khakhar in more than a decade, and the only one to take a comprehensive look across his entire oeuvre, this lavishly illustrated survey aims both to introduce the artist to a new audience and to move beyond established views, presenting a fresh take on his artistic, social and spiritual interests.

Significant essays on Khakhar's artistic influences, the importance of cosmopolitanism to his work and his frank explorations of mortality are accompanied by focused responses to key works by leading writers, curators and artists. Khakhar's unique voice is revealed in an excerpt from the last interview before his death in 2003, and in a series of reproductions of the humorous artist's book Truth is Beauty and Beauty is God, out of print since 1972. A visual biograp