Gallery Threshold, situated in Sarvodaya Enclave, is yet another new gallery testing the waters of the Capital?s art market. But its present show at the Visual Arts Gallery at the India Habitat Centre has a special significance. It features five major paper works of Bhupen Khakhar covering three decades that make these works the peg the whole show hangs from, despite the presence of other eminent artists like Ghulam and Nilima Sheikh, Akbar Padamsee, Sudhir Patwardhan, Arpita Singh and Jogen Choudhury, to name only a few. Indeed, it was a sad coincidence that the news of Bhupen?s death reached the gathering at the preview itself.

Rogues Gallery (1993) by Bhupen Khakhar

Born in 1934, he trained as an accountant but became one of our most significant artists of a powerful trend in our contemporary art that is best described as urban folk. It is something that could best emerge in India, which not only has rich and powerful living folk traditions, but also is a centre of an equally powerful modernist tradition that evolved with our national movement which projected the dream of a modern India that was fought for by mass peasant upsurges and uprisings. So the past survived to the extent it changed with the needs of the time. As a result, it gave us a uniquely deep-rooted and forward-looking artistic expression.

Bhupen used this complex condition to its fullest by giving it his own particular complexities and ambiguities. His style blended bazaar art of calendars and posters with the compositional structure and narrative of our traditional miniatures, especially those with a powerful iconic content, like the votive paintings of Nathdwara. It is to his credit that, by and large, he veered away from Kitsch and gimmickry.

He instead chose the tongue-in-cheek humour of our folk art and the stream-of-life presentation of our miniatures, blowing them up on canvas. It is not then accidental that his eye was attracted to that dark hero of the Yadavas, Krishna, who was a handle of contradictions, not unlike Khakhar himself. The Yadava hero became so closely identified with the women he sported with that we begin to find the great lover identifying so closely with the beloved. He even dresses up as a woman and is portrayed as such in our miniature art.

In the same way, this god identifies so closely with this worshippers that he actually dies. Bhupen has used similar complexities to tackle the question of the phenomenon of male bonding in a feudal society where the status of women is low and the reaction that emerges as homosexuality that tries to transform this condition by men taking on female attributes.

It is to his credit that he has done this with subtlety generally, though there are collaborative works of his with a Dutch artist that remind one of graffiti on walls of public lavatories. Mercifully, that phase was short-lived and not characteristic of him. It was followed up with his Gujarat violence series, reminding one that the artist had more than one concern on his mind and should not be type-cast as merely yet another spokesman for the gay cause.

His other themes include jibes at consumerism and self-mocking references to the exclusive male preserves created by patriarchal society. Everything was given a special treatment by his brush. Whether it was a many armed man making love to another or a jumble of cameos and portraits assembled as a ?Rogues Gallery? of friends in a seminal work in the collection of Mahesh Chandra, his style was inimitable.

Even where he handled conventional imagery like landscapes with trees, he replaced the tree-nymph with a cannon and cannon balls with his characteristic humour. This work, that came up for sale at the Christie?s New York auction on September 20, 2000, around the time he won the Prince Bernard Foundation Award of the Netherlands, was expected to fetch between $4000 and $6000. But it actually went for no less than $14100 (Rs 6,90,900 at the time), a highlight of the auction. The works at the exhibition, all watercolours on paper, were priced at between Rs 1,50,000 and Rs 2,50,000.

Bhupen Khakhar is an artist whose significance was not only recognised during his lifetime, but will continue to grow over time. His works can be accessed mainly from Vadhera Art Gallery in Delhi, Pundole in Mumbai and a number of collectors all over the country. His work is still accessible but will not be for long. So those who wish to possess this artist?s simple and spontaneous art that is one of the landmarks of our contemporary art scene, ought not to wait. His works will prove not only good companions but very good investment too.