Bhupen Khakhar

He was born in Bombay in 1934. A self-taught artist, Khakhar has evolved a mode of creative expression that is solely his. He was a qualified chartered accountant and yet he chose to move to Baroda in 1962 to join the Art Criticism course at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Within three years he held his first solo exhibition in Bombay.

Bhupen Khakhar manages to season his paintings by adding delightful instances of his sharp sense of observation. His ability to zero in on 'typical' characters that the observer can often locate within his/her own experience made his paintings wonderfully identifiable. His subjects are almost always marginal figures involved in acts that typify their position in the society.

Khakhar is also famous for having devised a way of painting the human body as a boneless mass of flesh, which seems not to be defined by a skeleton but by the personality of the subject. This particular aspect of his compositions also highlighted the vulnerability of his subjects.