Meets Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh in 1958 and becomes close to him. Ghulam introduces him to the newly founded Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda and encourages him to apply. By 1960, he joins the evening classes at the Sir J. J. School of Art but gets dejected by the pedagogy. In 1961, he joins the printmaking class of Vasant Parab who becomes his first teacher.

Moves to Baroda upon Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh's insistence. Joins the Art Criticism Course at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Is introduced to pop art through Jim Donovan- a British exchange student. Befriends Vivan Sundaram after meeting him at the Tarnetar Fair. This culminates into another important friendship.
After the rather oppressive atmosphere of Bombay, Baroda was a place where he recalled he "felt more at home". Although mentored by the likes of N.S. Bendre and K. G. Subramanyan, Khakhar remained to a large extent an autodidact. This is a pivotal time where a new "movement" in art was brewing and Baroda emerged as its epicentre. Bhupen initially looked up to the progressives of Bombay as embodying a modernist visual culture but soon got disenchanted by that.

Returns to Bombay after completing his diploma in Art Criticism.
Moving back to Bombay results in Bhupen's family imposing on him traditional heteronormative roles and resist his decision to pursue art. This compels him to leave home and recalled this event later, "Everything was crumbling to dust: chartered accountant, bungalow, car, flourishing practice, a queue of girls ready to be matched, wealth, prosperity..."He does not know what the world is like...soon he will come to his senses". Some of them even went on a fast. Would not speak to me for days on end. All their dreams were shattered..."

To this he added later, "I came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for me to stay in Bombay and paint. Because my family members would not allow me. I wanted complete freedom. At the back of my mind it also must be my gay attitude. I wanted to be in college for a few years so as to learn the craft of painting."

Thereafter he moves back to Baroda where he takes up a part time job as an accountant at Jyoti Limited, an engneering firm. Starts working on collages using popular oleographic images of deities and posters etc.

Collages are displayed at his first Solo Exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay. It is here that he gets hailed as "India's first Pop Artist". Meets Shankarbhai Patel, who would go on to become an important influence, muse and companion in the years to come.
Gets represented in Art Now in India, curated by George Butcher, Commonwealth Arts Festival, at Royal Festival Hall, London and Liang Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK

After returning to Baroda, he begins working on collages, explaining how "right from the beginning I was very much interested in things which were around me, and I was trying to find a different way of handling this."
Oleographs of deities and divinities were reworked by him using the visual language of kitsch and pastische with mirror, graffiti, gestural brushwork. The inspiration for these works were numerous- mughal court miniatures; romantic landscapes of Kishangarh; nineteenth century Company paintings; pichwais from Nathdwara;modern bazar oleographs; temple-maps of Jain temples etc. American modern artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are also stylistc influences.

Timothy Hyman questions this phase of Khakhar's Pop Art: "Was Khakhar sneering at, or celebrating, the imagery of popular religion? When Vivan Sundaram tried an experiment- hanging one of the collages in the Fine Arts canteen- he found it a few hours later, torn to shreds. The illiterate canteen-workers were in no doubt; it was blasphemy."

Throughout the mid sixties, he continues making collages out of popular oleographs and calendars.
Starts sharing rooms with Nagji Patel, Krishna Chhatpar and Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh (who had just returned from R.C.A. London) at the Shivmahal Palace Farmhouse, Baroda.
By 1967 he was represented in Seven Painters, Gallery One, London. This proved a pivotal moment in his career..

Of his tendency for iconoclam, he wrote, "I am somewhat of an iconoclast. In 1965 I had taken oleographs of divinities from popular calendars and stuck them on to canvas and painted over them. That upset people, I think. To them, gods are sacrosanct. My play (referring to his 1988 play Maujila Manilal) refutes that. I have shown that it rains in the fields of Badman as well as Goodman-the gods don't make any distinction there. Good deeds don't get you a place in heaven. The gods decide that- with a roll of the dice."

Leaves Jyoti Limited for a job with Bharat Lindner Pvt. Sets up quarters at the ground floor of the Residency Bungalow, Baroda where K.G. Subramanyan is a neighbour.

The painting "People at Dharmshala" earns him an Honourable Mention at I Triennale, India, New Delhi.

Represented in Art Scene Today, group show at Sanskar Kendra, Ahmedabad, organised by Gallery Chemould, Bombay.

Joint exhibition with Helen Marshall and Philliip Martin at Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay.

Gets represented in Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil; Art Today I and II, Kunika Chemould Art Centre, New Delhi; and Indian Painters '69, organised by Max Mueller Bhavan at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Calcutta.
Becomes co-editor (with G.M. Sheikh) of Vrischik, a journal of art (1969-73)

Paints Sheikh, Flower-pot and the Moon based on G.M. Sheikh. Timothy Hyman describes it as a work that "commemorates the enormous expanse of the room by moonlight. There is a "romantic" view beyond, across a park, to a doomed building of Taj Mahal affinity. But into the delicate conjunction of blue, lilac and white, there breaks a very red rectangle: Khakhar's comment on a painting by Sheikh himself."

The Vrischik magazine became in some senses "part of a wider reaction against the art of the "Bombay Progressive" generation. To substitute indigenous for international, and subject-matter to style- these were the basic propositions that would be contested over the next twenty years in Baroda; and by extension, in Khakhar's art."

A solo exhibition of his works is held at Kunika Chemould Art Centre, New Delhi.
Participates in Smithsonian Printmaking Workshop, New Delhi.

Despite slowly getting his due recognition after moving to Baroda, Khakhar struggled with a sense of identity as an artist. He lamented, "I felt very inferior; not able to speak in English; not so erudite....My painting, I felt very ashamed of it."
Till this time and until some time later, Khakhar primarily wanted to become a writer. Infact, painting for him was not something "serious", in his own words. He explained "I feel I've done my work as a social being when I've done my morning accountancy....I can't really paint 24 hours a day. So going to the office for two or three hours gives me the feeling that I have done my duty and I feel: now I can go and paint."

Becomes a member of the All India Protest Committee, organised by Vivan Sundaram, opposing the undemocratic modus operandi of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi. Vrischik (Year 2, No.3) features an account of the 1971 protest, the activities of the Committee, and the related formation of a Council of Indian Artists.
Starts painting in a style that is inspired by the miniature style of Indian painting. Timothy Hyman calls it a "neo-miniature" style.

In his "neo-miniatures", as Khakhar himself points out, "the human element is very limited…they don't assert themselves. The profile of the blind-eyed Shankarbhai, in Portrait of Shri Shankarbhai Patel near Red Fort (1971), is juxtaposed against trees and architecture but still in a rather schematic and unintegrated way; the figure too diminished to be of much consequence. But in Portaits of My Mother and My Father Going to Yatra (1971) the figures are much larger, and there is a sense of their being summoned from the distant past- as though pressed up against the picture-plane, battering to get in."

Drawing comparison with his inspiration David Hockney, he says "Hockney is concerned with physical beauty. I am much more concerned with other aspects like warmth, pity, vulnerability, touch."

Holds a Solo Exhibition titled Truth is Beauty and Beauty is God, Gallery Chemould, Bombay and designs a satirical catalogue for it. This Catalogue was playful, witty and unusual—he made three sections, a Biography, an 'Explanation of Paintings' and a 'Gratitude' section. During his visit to the Second Triennale-India, New Delhi, Howard Hodgkin who is a British artist and collector, admires his work.

In the Catalogue he writes: "When one is facing life in the raw one has to face many difficulties. These difficulties can be overcome if one possesses a sense of duty and patience. One should adhere to truth, should listen only to Truth and nothing but Truth. And this Truth ultimately leads us to Beauty. This Beauty is not skin deep. It is the beauty of soul."

The 70s were a time of political upheaval that several artists respond to in their own way—as does Bhupen. In the 1971 edition of Vrischik, he writes a description of Muktibahini soldier with a Gun, emphasising the political character of art that: "During our war with Pakistan...many Indian artists were inspired to do political paintings. I was one of the artists to be inspired. My only regret is that I started painting it after the war was over. I do not know why I was not inspired by the situation in the beginning."

Another painting done in the same year—Factory Strike relates to Muktibahini in the sense that the central figures look tame—and for a reason that Bhupen himself explains, "The middle class man has a peculiar position in society...he wants to reach the top but there is no room for him, or people at the top will not accept him. He cannot belong to workers because he always feels superior to them. He is in a dilemma. That is the reason why he stares at the audience. He is left alone."

The beginning of the decade of the 70s is a pivotal moment in Khakhar's art. Around the time of 1972, his visual language starts to acquire a quintessential character and the everyday men become his subject-matter. He began making little portraits that were approximately the size of a shop-sign board. These started to be called his "trade paintings".
"They described the professions of their subjects in the hybrid manner of eighteenth century colonial paintings referred to as the Company School, which Khakhar had studied. But rather than true likeness or documentation of the various trades, these were a most compassionate inventory, an effort to touch and handle what is real....He found himself entering upon a vista no painter had ever penetrated before: the vast terrain of half-westernised, half-urbanised modern India. His own background and lifestyle—his daily work as an accountant on the fringe of the city, his continuing intimacy with a wider range of human types and conditions than most artists' lives allow for—now began to pay off. More than any of his contemporaries, he was at home in his impure environment. An Indian painter who would, in Duranty's slogan, "take away the partition separating the studio from everyday life."

Nada Raza described one of these trade paintings thus: "Take, for instance, the work Barber's Shop 1972. The panes of the glass shopfront divide the image into thirds. Khakhar uses a Pepto-Bismol pink for the floor, petrol green for the walls, and decorates the raised plinth outside the shopfront with multicolored terrazzo....The shading of planes is Leger-esque, the crooked blue towel on the rail reminiscent of David Hockney, the faces painted amateurishly. The artist's enjoyment of the medium, of the application of paint and juxtaposition of colour, is evident in the detail of the letters, in the shadow and texture of the towel, and the jewelled terrazzo mosaic."

Adil Jussawalla talks about the sexual imagery, the euphemisms present in Khakhar's works. He writes: Man Eating Jalebee shows a man in the right foreground doing just that, while behind him there is a sea, a conversation, a departure. A detail of the face: The man is barely eating the jalebee. His eyes indicate he is not thinking of it at all, his teeth are gritted, he is going to have to force the sweet between them. And we are recalled to the sexual suggestiveness of the left hand on the table. Food in place of sex?"

Talking further about the figures of Bhupen's paintings, he comments that "If Khakhar's figures are lonely, and not all of them are, it is due to reasons specific to the individual painted—each individual's candour responding to the artist's, the artist's secrecy corresponding with what each individual wants kept secret. Painting them then becomes an act of empathy. The painter enters their vulnerable selves to exploit their vulnerablity; in doing so he exposes that vulnerability to public gaze. And we, the public, find ourselves admiring and supporting it. It shames us into acknowledging our own. And so the painter makes the weak lastingly strong. By exposing his subjects' strong weaknesses to our feeble strengths, he makes them acquire a permanent place in our affections. That is why we are drawn to them, why, sometimes, we love them. Painting as an act of empathy occasionally becomes a transformed act of love"

Gets his house 'Parmanand' (named after his late father) built in Vadodara and gets it designed according to his specification.
His long-term companion, Shankarbhai, dies. Shankarbhai's death leaves him grief-stricken and an observable shift occurs in his painterly theme which is informed by this personal loss, mourning and grief. The earlier trade paintings give way to large scale paintings such as Man with a bouquet of Plastic Flowers.

"It is nearly twice the size of the signboard pictures; and the foreground figure atleast four times the scale of the earlier "traders"—in fact, somewhat over life-size, and threatening to press forward beyond the picture-plane. This insistent white-garbed figure has about it something funereal-no longer advertisement, but effigy. He stares out at us, zombie eyes set in a darkened face, as minatory as a messenger from the grave. His stance is awkward: arms crossed, but while one huge hand clutches the bouquet, the other clenches a fold of his kurta- clinging on for dear life. Geeta Kapur calls him "the enshrined dummy of a man gone mad....The picture is about a milieu, and an absence; alterpiece and icon to a life misspent, to a death-in-life. The double scales are extremely deft and inventive; they enhance one another, so that the "miniature" is enlarged, and the "close-up" given a setting. With the help of a beautifully handled orange/pale-blue polarity, the complex image is unified."

Attends the first Kasauli Art Centre Artist Workshop organised by Vivan Sundaram.
Travels internationally for the first time to USSR, Yugoslava, Italy and the UK with the help of a cultural exchange programme of the Indian government. Whilst in UK, he stays with Howard Hodgkin and meets the painter and critic Timothy Hyman who in the late 1990s writes the first English-language monograph on Khakhar.

Khakhar was a precocious collector of objects—toys, figurines, prints, everyday collectibles that he would display in his home and studio in shelves and glass cabinets. Nada Raza contends that an early painting like Cabinet and the Shiva "served as an inventory of precious objects evidently belonging to a modest household, a cabinet of curiosities rendered in great detail."

Geeta Kapur while talking of his style sates that "In taste and style Bhupen instinctively identifies with the petty bourgeois. In this sense his indigenism, far from being a high-minded sentiment, is a matter of simple inevitability. In terms of values, however, the question is more complex. The commonness of his style is a cover for intentions that are quite often wicked. And his images, for all their deadpan appearance, manage to topsy turvy the class based sensibilities of the viewers."

Participates in Pictorial Space: A Point of View on Contemporary Indian Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan Galleries, curated by Geeta Kapur.
"Bhupen Khakhar, extraordinarily inventive in the treatment of pictorial space, has used the diagrammatic space of the popular maps of pilgrimage cities, where all objects are laid out flat with naive consistency and schematically related; the realistic space in calender scenery where the trompe l'oeil effects lead to the most eccentric distortions on account of the awkward hand of the bazaar artist; and, he has used the sweeping space of certain schools of miniatures (Kishangarh, and particularly Oudh) employing the device of the raised horizon to paint vistas of small town suburbs. In all these alternative uses of pictorial space, Bhupen's intention has been singular: to place his subject, the common, middle-class householder, in a setting that fuses his specific environment with his three-penny dream."

Works get shown in the XII Biennale internationale d'art, Palais d'Europe, Menton, France.
Following Geeta Kapur's 1975 essay titled 'The Fallacy of the Triennials', presented in a seminar at the Third Triennale India, Khakhar, Sheikh, Sundaram, Laxma Goud, Mrinalini Mukherjee and Gieve Patel boycott the Fourth Triennale—India. Instead, they open their own exhibition titled 'Six Who Declined to Show at the Triennale' at Kumar Gallery, New Delhi.

Upon his return to India, Khakhar's paintings evolve into large narrative paintings.
"Returning from his first visit to Europe, Khakhar spoke of how the early Italians "faced certain problems which I face also as a painter: how to include the narrative aspects in a painting without destroying its structure." Khakhar was especially interested in the predellas, the narrative strips appended to the large central icon of an alterpiece, and demanding a more intimate devotional reading. Death in the Family comes partly out of his response to early Italian art; to a visual world where the everyday and the miraculous, the humdrum street and the winged soul, were so closely meshed. But the parallels between Indian miniatures and Italian medieval painting are striking anyway- and the actual contemporary Indian scene often recalls 14th century Italy."

Bhupen spent close to six months in the Bath Academy in London upon getting invited to teach there and stays with Howard Hodgkin. This marked a pivotal moment in his journey of coming out of the closet. Having struggled with his sexuality for years, the West accorded him a new perspective.
He had confessed how "I was very much ashamed of my sexuality. I never wanted to be known I was gay. Up to 1975, I felt that if my friends knew I am gay, I was prepared to commit suicide...After my visit to England in 1979, I saw that homosexuality was accepted. People lived together..."
Somewhere then, Britain's greater liberal environment and acceptance of a sexuality that would have been considered "deviant" back in India helped Khakhar re-discover himself through an exploration of his sexuality. He saw first-hand the works of David Hockney who was an openly gay artist. Here onwards, instilled with a new sense of self-assurance, Khakhar's works start to acquire a confessional character. The painting Shadow of Death comes in the wake of such a critical time in his life. A handwritten poem on the verso thus goes
"A shadow of thing that seem,
and the greatest good is but small,
that all life and Death is a dream
all and that dreams. themselves is due to dream."
Khakhar, in the long line of greats like M.F. Husain, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, F.N. Souza and Hemendranath Mazumdar made the same artwork with minor variations in size, medium and form. Shadow of Death too can be found with minor alterations. In this case, the earliest collection of Bhupen's Art was built by Prince (now King) Manvendra Singh Gohil of Rajpipla. Interestingly, he was the first openly gay member of India's Rajput Royalty. He owned the larger version of the painting.

Adil Jussawalla comments how "making full use of the more liberal climate in Britain during his two brief stays there, he has produced explicit sexual imagery that in some way challenges that very liberalism. Man in Pub, with the man clutching a repulsive pair of gloves in front of his crotch, the very arrangement of his trousers on a chair in a narrative panel suggesting a sexual posture, is a painting about sexual frustration if ever there was one. For the man there is no enjoyment in any sexual act, even a solitary one. His expression is held-in, taut. And his thighs and hips are gripped by the sides of his jacket as though in an iron clamp."

"The Weatherman (1979,) is a fantasy generated by the desolate preoccupations of an English winter. Off-duty between his interminable TV appearances, in a bedroom still haunted by charts, and clad only in pyjama-bottoms, socks and specs, he is (Khakhar tells us) "facing rejection on sexual grounds". The Englishman is here imagined in all his ghastly pinkness, as he prods his comatose spouse. Outside, the dreary pub beckons, with TOILETS and (it is needed) COURAGE. Despite the high-keyed colour, the flow of pattern, the rose-strewn carpet flooded with light, the sense is of an appalling tedium and blankness. Khakhar wanted to attempt a non-Indian interior ("the bed looks very English") and also to use a different range of colour. He began the picture with as he usually does - one dominating hue, in this case the deep blue of the carpet. With that in place, the figures could take shape (the wife with characteristically tiny feet); until, several weeks later - and with the glossy blue finally dried he painted the roses over it."

Khakhar's mother as well as his beloved Vallavbhai pass away. The death of his mother—in itself traumatic— accorded him a new freedom of public action. Hereforth his art became extremely confessional as a result of his openly coming out of the closet.
Timothy Hyman noted how "He found himself, once again, speaking for a class and a world hitherto unregarded, unrecorded."

Adil Jussawala remarks, "If I had to define him according to the evidence of his work so far, I'd call him a Master of Mischief; one who, along with the many venerable objects he has overturned, has succeeded in standing Plato on his head. If he has a belief, I think it is this: The world we inhabit and the world of ideal forms are both part of one world—this, the only one there is. And the ideal world is represented in his paintings....Khakhar is not basically concerned with attacking the injustice and the hypocrisy of the world we live in through his paintings. He attacks the world because it is not like his paintings."

In 1981, Khakhar paints one of his most well-known paintings—You Can't Please All. Inspired by two episodes from Aesop's Fable about two men and a donkey, Khakhar situates the Greek lore in the panorama of a small Indian town. He describes the fable like this: "There's an old man—father and son. They go to market to sell a donkey. While they're going, there are people who say "why are you walking? why don't you sit on the donkey?" So they both sit on the donkey. Afterwards people say "look at those two fellows, they're so inhuman sitting on a donkey" So, father gets down and son sits on the donkey. When son is sitting on the donkey, people say "look at this son...this old man is walking and he doesn't have any pity on his father." So the son gets down and the father climbs. Then people say—"look at this old man, this young boy hardly 16 is walking in the sun and the father doesn't have any pity." So they both get down and decide to carry the donkey. While they carry the donkey, there is a bridge and they try to cross the bridge and the donkey falls into the river and dies. While they bury the donkey, the old man says "You really can't please all".

"Guru Jayanti and its successor You Can't Please All might be seen as the fulfilment of the Baroda "project". It was in the late seventies that people first began to speak of a Baroda "School" of painting, centered on the Faculty of Fine Arts, but including in its looser sense several of the outstanding artists of the middle generation. In Bombay, Sudhir Patwardhan, Nalini Malani and Gieve Patel; in Delhi, Vivan Sundaram and Jogen Chowdhury; together with Nilima and Gulam Sheikh, and Khakhar in Baroda itself. Their shared rediscovery (in full awareness of modernist taboos) of deep space, of narrative, of the world and its depiction- all this united a distinct group. Their shared exemplars might comprise: Sienese painting, Brueghel, Kitaj, Romanesque manuscripts, Bonnard; but also, centrally, a reappraisal of the entire Indian tradition, carried out over many years by Gulam Sheikh."

Participates in Six Indian Painters at Tate, London, curated by Howard Hodgkin. By displaying his works alongside those by deceased artists Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil, K.G. Subramanyan and M.F. Husain, Hodgkin writes hm into an Indian genealogy of artistic greatness.

Participates in Contemporary Indian Art, Festival of India Exhibtion at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, conceived by Richard Bartholomew, Geeta Kapur and Akbar Padamsee.

Works get shown in Contemporary Indian Art, selected by L.P. Sihare from the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC.

'I told lies. I did not have the courage to confess I was going to see and meet my boyfriend… But Gandhi spoke truth; I told lies. He was fearless; I was and am still, a coward. Now slowly at the age of sixty I have summoned up the courage to speak about my preferences, about my boyfriends…' Khakhar confessed in an interview given to Timothy Hyman in 1995.
Two Men in Benaras proved to be one of Khakhar's most pivotal and "explicit" works—a bridge for the artist in his efforts to "come-out in open". By placing the sacred and the profane/sexual on the same plane, juxtaposed together, he's making a larger claim of the body on the barricades of the two realms.


"Khakhar's sexual encounters were for much of his life with men of his own age or younger, met by chance, perhaps on a single occasion. I think it is an episode of this kind that he records in the large (almost six-foot-square) canvas, Two Men in Banaras. This is a divided and double-scaled image: the lyrical golden landscape, with its sadhus and small shrines among trees (the Ganges flowing round them), set so surprisingly against the two giant men on the left. They are dramatically lit, a blue and purple margin surrounds them like a dark aureole. They stand in a naked embrace, their erect penises almost touching. Significantly, the face of the older man is masked by the dark, urgent profile of the younger. But we see the back of the head, whose white hair and elephantine ear are unmistakably Khakhar's own. The image conjoins genital excitement and a religious setting, the sexual (even if it might seem mere casual lust) is located in the sacred. This "religious" sense of sexuality becomes more evident in his devotion to elderly men, already mentioned in relation to Shankarbhai. Khakhar himself refers to such relationships as "compulsive" and "obsesional", but their outward character is more like the service of a chela; all tender companionship and gentle affectionate sympathy."

The film 'Messages from Bhupen Khakhar' made by Judy Marle for the Arts Council of Great Britain gets screened on ITV.

Sanay Jhaveri writes that "Messages from Bhupen Khakhar (1983) vividly portrays the artist in Baroda (now Vadodara), where he lived and worked for most of his life. Over images depicting Khakhar's home and studio, he introduces himself as: 'A man labelled Bhupen Khakhar, branded as painter'. The implication is that although he performs and inhabits the role of a painter every day, he does so from a knowing distance. As the film progresses, it becomes evident that Khakhar played an active collaborative role in the making of the film, and thus the presentation of himself. "

Gets awarded the Padma Shri- the fourth highest civilian honour by the Government of India.

Khakhar advises, at this stage of his life, that one must avoid "safety": "Safety" is the word you all should hate. In education, in marriage, in journey, in job, in neighbourhood, on a picnic- anywhere we inherently need safety. The safety of people and places we already know very well. Who are familiar to us. The moment you are with strangers, whether on a train, street, or in a classroom, you become uneasy. Uncomfortable."

Partcipates in East-West Encounter, exhibition and symposium, Jehangir Art Gallery, Max Mueller Bhavan, and National Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay

"A key image (which I at first considered awkward and unachieved) is Seva (service). It tells explicitly of the relation between master and disciple, through the medium of touch the grasping of the leg The surrounding element the women waiting for their separate darshan, and the nocturnal world beyond - are extinguished by this numinous enactment; the light which fills the two profiles creates, a moment of revelatory stillness. What passes between them is both a surrender, and a bestowal, of power, this passing of energy is conveyed by a sort of bafflement on the face of the master. The image marvellously embodies Khakhar's own transaction with his older partners. Throughout the 1980s, the loved one whose features constantly recur is Vallavbhai, a retired building contractor who Khakhar first met in 1965, but came to know well only a decade or so later. My Dear Friend (1983) presents them joyously together under a quilt, the bespectacled Khakhar gazing raptly at the other's somewhat skeletal features. Below their upper room (cut-away, so that it resembles the simple cowshed of a Christian nativity) one sees the various activities of a typical Khakhar town. But on the roof are two male figures, who spy down upon the lovers - and whose gossip will have to be faced."

Works get shown in Coups de Coeur, Halle Sud, Geneva.

Works in collaboration with Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram to paint a large-scale mural at Shah House in Juhu, Bombay.

Paints Yayati, of which Timothy Hyman notes that :"Khakhar's strange sexual predicament is made most explicit in Yayati, whose ostensible theme is a myth from the Mahabharata: the king who, rather than grow old and impotent, asks his son to give him his youth….Khakhar acknowledges that Yayati is "about me", and that the prince/angel is recognisably a self. Yet, at 53, Khakhar already felt elderly. He suffered from "loss of vitality".
From this point on, much of Khakhar's work will be, in one way or another, fantasy. As Khakhar explains, "with old people, whose sexual capacity has withered, fantasy plays a greater role". But his pleasure in painting has always involved, he says, a "fetishist" dimension (for instance, of representing the clothes of the beloved). And thus, in many works, "the act of painting turned into the act of making love".

Starts writing a script for a full-length comedy drama, Maujila Manilal.

For the writing of his play Maujila Manilal he would not paint in as fecund a manner anymore. For the next two years he devoted his focus on the theatrical mise en scène, the production and the dramatics of the play. His interest in theatre would later on also get explored through designing the interior set for Fareeda Mehta's 2002 film Kali Salwar, based on several short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto.

Preeti Shah writing for the The Independent commented:
"Manilal himself is a caricature of Krishna, Khakhar's favourite God, the ethereal enchanter, the eternal lover. As Savita says, "Manilal is neither mine nor yours. He is everyone's". But he is not portrayed as a handsome dandy. He is middle-aged and can boast of no physical attraction. The two potent aphrodisiacs that he brandishes are his fragrant hair (plastered with Brahmi oil) and the ability to make love in English."

Even though the play would not help him make any money, he went on to proclaim that he simply had to do it— "I know how to assess myself. If I don't paint for a year, I don't think the world is going to be bereft."

Works are shown in Open Mind, curated by Jan Hoet, Museum van Hedendaagese Kunst, Ghent; The Richness of the Spirit: Selection from Contemporary Figurative Indian Art, Kuwait Museum and Egyptian Academy, Rome; and Artists Alert, exhibition and auction of works for the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat), Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi.

Starts painting the stage set for the performances in Bombay, Vadodara and Ahmedabad.

Produces five woodcuts and three linocuts for a privately published limited edition of Two Stories by Salman Rushdie, Free Radio and The Prophet's Hair.

Retires from his accountancy job at Bharat Lindner Pvt. Ltd after twenty-seven years.

Gets featured in Figures of Thought by Arun Khopkar along with Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram.

Works are shown in Ambassador's Choice: Contemporary Indian Art from the Collection of H.E. Mrs. E.M. Schoo, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

Collaborates with Malani and Sundaram on a series of mixed-media works for Splash: Images on Glass, Gallery Chemould, Bombay

In an interview given to the Economic Times, he proclaims that :"My interests have changed over the years. There was a time when I painted landscapes, with the human figure kept very small. Then came man and his environment; as a result, traders, barbers and tailors have long inhabited my painting. Now fantasy has entered my work, along with a certain spirit of freedom..and my work is much less naturalistic."

Gets selected by curator Jan Hoet to showcase works at Documenta IX, Kassel—becoming, along with Anish Kapoor, the first Indian Artist to do so.

Khakhar presented a group of paintings in the Documenta—namely Caves (1991), Ghost City Night (1991) and Pink City (1991) alongside the installation entitled Paan Beedi Shop—a dummy of a life-sized booth with Khakhar himself imitating a seller selling cigarettes and paan (betel-nut leaves). This also alluded to a previous collage work titled Paan Shop that he had done in the beginning of his career.

Jan Hoet had remarked how the installation was not well received:
"Earlier Bhupen Khakhar painted booths, and now he combines reality with painting: he constructs the booths from his paintings and now one really can buy cigarettes there. However western-like, many people do not like it. I think it is a possibility to experience another world, to reflect one's own world. Khakhar does not place his booth as irrevocable statement, but questions our complacency."

Works are shown in the exhibition, The Spirit of India. Gallery Nouvelles, The Hague.
Participates in India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; A Critical Differrence: Contemporary Art from India, an Aberystwyth Arts Centre Touring Exhibition, UK; and Trends and Image, Centre of International Modern Art, Calcutta.

Nada Raza reveals: "Khakhar's lovers were often older men, ordinary men with undistinguished lives whom he looked after and cared for with exceptional devotion, as remembered by Sheikh. In Gallery of Rogues (1993) they are lovingly enshrined, like deities. Once he spotted such a companion, he would fall deeply in love with him and offer worshipful service to the deity of the day. The needy would receive financial aid, the sick and ailing would get tender care. The gallery in the painting consists of a series of smaller canvases framed and then nailed together. Khakhar is now taking the multiple scenes into individual, independent frames, forcing the viewer to consider each face, each mood and inflection as having a life of its own, amalgamated by the artist into a memorial for the dearest of his lovers."

Starting from the seventies, Khakhar had started watercolours. Initally the subject matter was mostly what he saw—landscapes, trees, shrines, figures etc. But Hyman notes that he soon "began to exploit the potential of watercolour to dematerialise—its rendering all transparent, evanescent. Bodies and objects could overlay or interpenetrate one another, in a sort of underwater weightlessness, that also affirmed the mind's free fantasy. Watercolour's insubstantiality seemed more easily reconcilable than oil with these nonchalant inventions, a "magic realist" genre in which heads might contain a multiplicity of figures or figures sprout a multiplicity of heads."

Gets invited by BBC to travel to London to paint a portrait of Salman Rushdie.

Works are shown in 100 Years: From the NGMA Collection, curated by Geeta Kapur, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
Works get shown in a solo exhibition at Kapil Jariwala Gallery, London.
Participates in The Other Self, a group exhibition and workshop of Indian and Dutch artists.

Nada Raza remarks:
"While Khakhar's contemporaries rallied around darkening social conditions in India—communal violence in Ayodhya in the 1990s, which had spilled over into terrible riots in Gujarat and attacks in Mumbai In the decade to follow- he was contending with a personal battle. Khakhar was perhaps as belated and indirect in responding to the overtly political now as he had been in 1971, but his embrace of the grotesque coincided with a particularly ugly reality. Wall/Woman/Masjid (1995) depicts the mosque being destroyed amid great controversy in Ayodhya in 1992, behind a brick wall bearing the lotus symbol of the Bhartiya Janata Party."

Sakhibhav, Karin Zitzwitz remarks, "depicts a disputed practice of Krishna Bhakti, in which devotees dress and act as Sakhis, the female friends of Krishna's lover Radha, in order to express their love for God. In this and other images, Khakhar calls attention to the value placed on the ecstatic physical effects of religious devotion, and considers their proximity to the experience of sexual love."

Works shown in Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions, curated by Apinan Poshyananda, Asia Society, New York.

Gulammohammed Sheikh writes of Son is the Father of Man: "The age gap between the protagonist and the 'midget' is reduced:you find a middle-aged man with a middle-aged man-child in his arms. Is it a rumination on ageing by invoking infancy, or vice-versa? Is this man dreaming of his own childhood-self in the guise of an aged man or has his middle-aged self turned infant-like? Who is the child then? Were you to look for kinship, you would conclude that the 'child' hardly resembles the man holding it. The finely etched face of the 'child' looks upwards, desirous, while his hand mimics the massive hand of his holder. But why is he a baby? Does it hint at the gay protagonist's deprivation, or a secret desire for children? Chiildhood and old age are sad bedfellows: the very thought of their companionship throws wager at destiny."

Works get shown in Private Mythology: Contemporary Art from India, The Japan Foundation, Tokyo.

His short story- Phoren Soap gets published in a bilingual Gujarati-English edition with etchings and deals with the themes of infidelity and fantasy intertwined with humour.

Gets diagnosed with prostate cancer.

It is interesting to note that Khakhar although not a declared believer, grew up in a Vaishnava household and had deep influence of his partner Vallavbhai Shah who was a follower of the Radhasoami sect.
In his painting Ram Bhakt Hanuman, Khakhar draws on the cult of Ram which is based on loyalty and exemplified by the Monkey warrior Hanuman.

Karin Zitzwitz notes:
"While Khakhar's painting is largely iconographically correct, it casts this moment in a very different light. It shows a slender and relatively humble Ram extending his arms protectively around an unusually monkey-like Hanuman, whose long arms grasp him tightly in return. While this large watercolour displays his considerable virtuosity in the medium, Khakhar demonstrates discomfort in his treatment of the figures' overlapping legs"

In an interview given to Sadanand Menon, Khakhar reveals: "When I did Ram Bhakt Hanuman 1998, I was quite serious. Because there is a certain kind of relation I feel may have existed between them- animal and man- but I have not made it very explicit or I would not have been able to exhibit in anywhere."

Designs the Poster for Gay Games Amsterdam 1998 Cultural Program

After the diagnosis with cancer, Khakhar's works acquire a new character and sensibility.
Nada Raza comments of the materiality of his paintings: "In works expressing agony and the humiliation of bodily failure, Khakhar returned to the luminous Kalighat-inspired technique with which he had experimented in Muktibahini Soldier with a Gun 1972, balancing the horror of violence with the lightest transluscent glazes of colour like in At the End of the Day Iron Ingots Came Out 1999 and the watercolour Birth of Crocodile 2000. 'The essense of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life.' wrote Bakhtin of Rabelais, and Khakhar's work from this period similarly embraces the terrible, the violent and the cruel without hesitation."

Participates in the Third Gwangju Biennale, South Korea

Receives a Prince Claus Award, supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"In Khakhar's large narrative paintings",writes Nada Raza," the urban vista became the staging ground for multiple stories, doorways and windows theatrically framing the action as detailed vignettes. Views through windows, or an azure sea near the high line of the horizon, are motifs that Khakhar used often, delineating interior, private worlds alongside more imaginative yearnings. Yagnya or Marriage describes a central ritual event taking place as residents of the town continue to perform more mundane actions, allowing for the simultaneity of high and low, of the spiritual existing alongside the base, the banal next to the extraordinary. These were ambitious works, cinematic in scope, describing in detail the 'modern life' of a small town such as Baroda. For Khakhar, the pictorial plane became a ground for describing the world in affectionate, idiosyncratic, simultaneous detail."

Partcipates in Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London, alongside Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani and Atul Dodiya; and Telling Tales: Narrative Impulses n Recent Art, Tate Liverpool.

Works are shown in Abbild: Recent Portraiture and Depiction, curated by Peter Pakesch for Steirischer Herbst, Graz.

His collection of ten illustrated short stories, Maganbhai No Gundar gets published in Gujarati. The same year, a selection of his writngs (Maganbhai's Glue, Pages from a Diary, Vadki, Phoren Soap and Maujila Manilal) is published in a single-volume English translation.

Since the diagnosis, disease became an everyday lived reality- he faced death as a daily struggle and his paintings now reflected that human condition- of mortality and morbidity. Geeta Kapur writes "Khakhar's myriad friendships mutated into painterly language. The act of applying oil paint on canvas and watercolour on paper was lovingly fetishised in the touch of the brush...Through the course of his illness, Khakhar's organs (brain, abdomen, genitals) were treated with radiation; he was driven to anxiety and to incontinence. This led him to act out, in the medium of painting, the state of being endured as a despoiled body, fearful of being spurned and in turn spurning the other's touch"

Travels with Ghulammohammad Sheikh to Chicago where their works are exhibitedin Walsh Gallery.

Visits Sri Lanka with a group of artists and writers, organized by the Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai.
The playwright Naushil Mehta wrote in his recollection of Khakhar:
"Khakhar's cancer resurfaced savagely, towards the end of '02. His radiation treatment was now possible locally, so he did not need to be in Mumbai. This was the most frantic period his friends ever saw in the Khakhar household…Of course, Bhupen was working every moment he could- managing the debility along with the pain- recovering from a new show in Baroda, planning a retrospective in Mumbai, writing new stories, sketching, painting."

The playwright Naushil Mehta wrote in his recollection of Khakhar:
"Khakhar's cancer resurfaced savagely, towards the end of 2002. His radiation treatment was now possible locally, so he did not need to be in Mumbai. This was the most frantic period his friends ever saw in the Khakhar household…Of course, Bhupen was working every moment he could- managing the debility along with the pain- recovering from a new show in Baroda, planning a retrospective in Mumbai, writing new stories, sketching, painting."

His last solo exhibition takes place at Sarjan Art Gallery, Vadodara.

Khakhar's long-term partner. Vallavdas Shah dies on 30 July, aged eighty-one; on August 8, aged sixty-nine, Khakhar himself dies.
Three months after his death, NGMA opens a retrospective.

Nada Raza comments:
"After his visit to Sri Lanka, Khakhar tried metallic paints, using burnished tones to highlight delicate clouds or rain, or to decorate the background behind a series of Buddhist monks that he painted in this period. The accordion-fold book on Sri Lanka, made in 2003 best represents the mood of these works, the beatific expressions of the figures perhaps an attempt to connect to higher, exalted states even as his body deteriorated."