Eminent painter Bhupen Khakhar died on Friday evening in Vadodara after a prolonged illness, family sources said.

He was suffering from cancer and on Thursday had been admitted to the Bhailalbhai Amin Hospital, they said.

Khakhar is a Padmashree and had also been honoured with the Kalidas award.

He was born in Mumbai in 1934 and was 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

He held his first solo exhibition in Bombay in 1965 and has had fourteen solo shows since, in Bombay, New Delhi, Baroda, London, Ahmedabad, Amsterdam, Den Haag, Paris and Tokyo.

Khakhar, a bachelor, has also been widely represented in group exhibitions, including Art Now in India, and was one of the few Indian painters to have enjoyed an international reputation.

His noted paintings include Guru jayanti, Man with plastic flowers and You cannot please all, some of which are in galleries in the United Kingdom and Spain.

Khakhar's work, according to the 20th Century Museum of Contemporary Indian Art, has rare irreverence and a lack of inhibition about his lack of formal training.

Among others, he was also honoured by the Madrid-based National Museum of European Countries, sources said.

Agencies