Considered India’s first pop artist, Bhupen Khakhar is best known for his intimate paintings depicting figures immersed in richly coloured landscapes. His art harks back to Indian miniatures and to the primitivism of Henri Rousseau, popular folk art and to Hockney, who he met in London. He worked as an accountant and painted in his free time, and his declared homosexuality marked him out in his homeland as an object of ridicule and condemnation. He fought incessantly for gay rights, and tackled explicitly homoerotic themes in his work.
