Bhupen Khakhar

Bhupen Khakhar trained and qualified as a chartered accountant in Mumbai and worked for years in that profession, painting only in his spare time and with no formal art training. He eventually moved to Baroda to study art criticism, putting him among painters and writers rather than accountants, though he kept doing accounting work on the side well into his career as an artist.

His paintings took as their subject the unglamorous texture of Indian middle-class and working life, tailors, watch repairers, tea shops and barbers, painted with a flat, deliberately unfashionable style that drew on popular calendar art and cinema hoardings rather than Western modernism. Critics were initially unsure what to make of work that seemed to mock and honour its subjects at once.

In 1981, in his late forties, he painted You Can't Please All, showing a naked older man on a balcony looking down on a town below, one of the first paintings by an Indian artist to address homosexuality directly, at a time when it remained a criminal offence in India and rarely discussed publicly by public figures. Coming out through his art rather than in private life, at an age when many careers are already set, marked a decisive turn in both his work and his openness about himself.

Khakhar continued painting increasingly bold and personal work until his death from cancer in 2003. Tate Modern gave him a major retrospective in 2016.