Bhupen Khakhar | the artist

Bhupen Khakhar was born in Bombay in 1934. He is a self- taught artist, having qualified as a chartered accountant before moving to Baroda in 1962 to join the Art Criticism course at the Faculty of Fine Arts. It was here that he started painting and became involved with the seminal Narrative Figurative movement.

Portraits of my mother and my father going to Yatra

You Can’t Please All was painted at Khakhar’s house in Baroda, India. It illustrates Aesop’s fable of a father and son taking their donkey to market. The solitary figure on the balcony, who is watching the story unravel, is a self-portrait of the artist.

Only a very few other artists in our times have used the resources drawn from one’s self as melodramatically and as queerly as Bhupen Khakhar did. His paintings and prints, particularly over last two decades of his life, stand testimony to this…