BHARTI KHER
Jack Shainman Gallery

‘Unity in Diversity” was a familiar slogan from the early days of India’s independence, and serves well for the debut New York exhibition of the ascendant British-born young Indian artist, Bharti Kher. Her show includes animal sculptures; what look, at first, like abstract paintings, and a vaguely surrealist found assemblage. There are marked differences of handling and sensibility from one group to the next, but common threads. “Solarum Series” (2007), a sculpture in fiberglass and metal, is a tree bearing a bestiary of heads as its very strange fruit. Some are of known animals, others mythological creatures, and they vary as well between the cuddly and the grotesque.

Two monumental sculptures dominate the main gallery: “The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own” (2006), again in fiberglass, depicts a life-size elephant in repose, and “An Absence of Assignable Cause” (2007), which gives its name to the show, is also to scale as a replica of a whale’s heart, the largest organ in nature.

The surfaces of both these sculptures are decorated with bindis, the “third eye” body decorations worn by both sexes on the forehead, purchased en masse from Delhi markets by the artist. In contrast with the more familiar red-spot bindis, the elephant is covered all over with a rare, white, spermiform bindi which follows the contours of the recumbent animal in whirling spiral formations.

The bindi is also the component of her abstract “paintings,” such as “Of Bloodlines and Bastards” (2007), a four-paneled polyptych of various sizes of red and black bindi on mirror supports in closely hung, heavy black frames. The color masses into striations in such a way as to resemble various pattern formations in nature, whether flames, mudflats viewed aerially, or parched animal skin. A much simpler, but still mind-bogglingly exacting work in terms of the meditative calm that must have been required for its execution is the spiral of white bindis on a red ground in “When an Angel Passes Over You” (2007).

In Ms. Kher’s handling of it, the bindi is physically, culturally, and aesthetically mutlilayered — a kind of postmodern pointillism, recalling similar digital devices from Seurat and Klimt to Damien Hirst. Functioning at a purely decorative level, it has incredible vibrancy and purity. As a found object, it retains what is an inbuilt ambiguity of significance, as the bindi has both spiritual origins and secular usage. Though culturally specific to India, it is universal as a metaphor of the atoms and cells that constitute our world.

Until December 22 (513 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-645-1701).