After a long period of focusing primarily on sculpture, artist Bharti Kher has returned to painting—great paintings that are bold, energetic works—monumental in scale, vivid in color, and emotionally charged. Through them, Kher has rediscovered a medium that feels at once deeply intimate and powerfully expressive.

Her latest exhibition, “The Sun Splitting Stones,” which opened at Perrotin Paris earlier this week, brings together a striking group of new paintings and sculptures. The show also marks Kher’s most significant presentation of recent paintings in recent years.

Bharti Kher, Weather Painting: The sun splitting stones (2023–2024) ©Bharti Kher / ADAGP, Paris, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

But why return to painting now? Across her 25 year career, Kher has explored animism, mythical beasts, and contemporary poetic experience across a range of media. Among her most famous works is the 2006 sculpture The skin speaks a language not its own which consists of a large-scale fiberglass female elephant coverd in bindis. Ahead of the opening, I spoke with Kher, who is now New Delhi-based, curious as to what was driving her renewed engagement with painting—and what it means for her practice today. 

The title of Bharti Kher’s new exhibition is taken from one of the paintings on view—a work she had been contemplating for a long time. It was one of the first pieces she made upon returning to painting after years focused primarily on sculpture. The image of the sun penetrating something as impenetrable as rock or stone came from Kher’s contemplation of the impossibility of matter, and how nature and energy manifest together—not as opposites, but as forces in harmony. “But actually, philosophically, or if you look at it in Western stoicism, the rock and the sun are the same thing,” she reflected.

This idea—of opening what seems impossible to open—resonates deeply with Kher’s own mode of painting. It draws her back to a practice grounded in introspection. “A very internal space, the inner workings of the body,” she says.

The human body, particularly the female body, has always been central to Kher’s practice. Yet her interest goes beyond its external form. Her work speaks to internal mechanisms—how emotions and thoughts converge in what we call the body. Her sculptures often wear objects and inscriptions, referencing systems of culture and belief. 

Bharti Kher, Weather Painting the hunger (2023–2024). ©Bharti Kher / ADAGP, Paris, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

But as she delves deeper inward, “they become more strange or otherworldly,” she said. “There’s a kind of visceral, almost interior sensory apparatus happening. It’s cognitive. I think that you not only experience the work, but you see the body, you see with your entire body.”

Kher embraces the idea that there is no singular language for artistic creation. “You enter a space or you enter a piece of work from both the inside and the outside,” she says. “The way that I’m approaching painting is to almost describe the space around an object as almost the negative space of how energy becomes seen or manifests. It all looked at.”

When painting, she moves fluidly between multiple canvases—a method not unlike her sculptural process. “Things grow together,” she explained. “And then they will start to connect. There’s a lot of flow, and also a grounding function of the work.”

Views of Bharti Kher’s exhibition “The Sun Splitting Stones” at Perrotin Paris, 2025. Photo: Claire Dorn. ©Bharti Kher/ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

This new body of paintings is marked by a heavy, vibrant use of oil paint, monumental in scale and bold in color. “I’m not afraid of color,” she shared. “I love color. I break all the rules of color.” Her sensitivity to color traces back to her childhood, growing up around her mother’s sari shop. India, she says, is “very riotous in color,” and under the equatorial sun, the brightness and intensity of those hues take on an entirely different dimension.

Kher shares candidly that she was ill for nearly two years following the Covid pandemic, unable to work in the studio. It was a period marked by deep frustration and emotional distress. During that time, painting, particularly its solitude, became a crucial release and form of healing. “These paintings were forming, these paintings were being formed in my subconscious in some way,” she says. “And I wanted to break this sort of spell that was somehow stopping me from being able to make my sculpture and to make the rest of my work.”

The titular painting, Weather Painting: The sun splitting stones, contains a kind of tension. It’s challenging, and even unsettling. “But there’s enough order and balance and architecture in the piece that allows the work somehow to sing,” she explained. “Every work has its grace or level or place of sitting or comfort.” For Kher, painting is “an enigma.” That’s precisely what excites her—especially in returning to the medium after so long. “I’m kind of creating spaces for myself to enter this new language of making work again.” Painting offers a level of abstraction that, for viewers, evokes “a very strong internal experience.”

“Our body is like an incredibly sophisticated machine that processes everything between your mind and your body, and they’re constantly communicating,” she considered. “Sometimes I feel that what I’m trying to do with this new body of paintings is tap into some of that internal decision that’s happening.”

Views of Bharti Kher’s exhibition “The Sun Splitting Stones” at Perrotin Paris, 2025. Photo: Claire Dorn. ©Bharti Kher/ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Compared to painting, sculpture is surprisingly easier to talk about for her.“You have a physical three-dimensional object that you can relate to in terms of the body and your own body in terms of scale, how you feel around it, and what it tries to manifest, where the metaphor comes from.”

One of the key sculptural works in the show, The alchemist, is described by Kher as a kind of self-portrait. It features a female figure standing before a triangular form—an object the artist is deeply fascinated by. For her, the triangle, with no clear inside or outside, is the most paradoxical of shapes. It’s an emblem of manifestation, but also holds strong spiritual and even shamanistic potential. Kher’s work often references the dualities of “inner” and “outer,” “above” and “below,” as well as states of support and balance. Paradox, she insists, is vital.

The woman in The alchemist acts as a connector—an axis around which all the elements of the exhibition orbit. “She’s the talisman in the show,” Kher explained. This figure carries strange objects—circles, teeth, talismanic forms. “It’s almost like these are the things that she collects to give her power. And that’s why I sort of always felt that I’d never made a self-portrait.”

Views of Bharti Kher’s exhibition “The Sun Splitting Stones” at Perrotin Paris, 2025. Photo: Claire Dorn. ©Bharti Kher/ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

For Kher, the female figure in The alchemist is a projection of her studio self—a symbolic embodiment of the creative power she channels when making art. “This is where my power is when I make art,” she says. “I feel like I am the alchemist, I’m the magician. I can create whatever it is that I want to make.” The act of creation, for her, is also an act of activation: she imbues objects with time, with memory, with presence. Many of the materials she uses are old, marked by prior histories and personal signatures. By attaching these objects to her sculptures, she animates them—“almost like an animist,” she explains.

This belief that all things hold life—be it the stone, the sun, or even a split itself—forms the conceptual core of the exhibition. “Even the split is a thing,” she says. “The split is not just an action. The split is a matter. It’s an energy that then opens up an impenetrable object.”

I noticed that many of her sculptural works span years in the making. Kher explains this simply: art-making isn’t a matter of executing a concept from start to finish. Rather, it’s a process that allows for change, that embraces shifts in direction. In her view, it is the rhythm of time that truly shapes the work.

An artist who once described her studio as a lab, Kher continues to experiment restlessly. Lately, she’s been drawn to paper—an unfamiliar material in her practice, but one that excites her precisely because of its contradictions. “It’s not a reliable material,” she says, “but it’s light, fragile yet strong, even flammable.” Next, she hopes to travel to Kashmir to explore local, natural materials firsthand—extending her inquiry into matter, place, and memory.

“Bharti Kher: The Sun Splitting Stones” is on view at Perrotin Paris through December 20, 2025.