“I confess I like women,” says artist G Ravinder Reddy. The attraction is simple. He likes the elaborate embellishments — the jewellery, the variety of ways in which women make their hair — that he can add to the monumental sculptural heads he creates. The male form falls short.
Rasa , the new solo exhibition at Kolkata’s Emami Art, has a concentration of 14 female heads (works from 1989 to the present), showing shifts in Reddy’s artistic practice spanning more than three decades. The most dramatic is evident from the 1989 bust in terracotta, an early medium that he found incompatible with his idea of size and problematic in its frailty, but which he used for lack of funds. In the 1990s, he discarded this for industrial fibreglass, one of the first Indian artists to do so, which allowed him freedom in shape, size and use of colour.
The repeat aesthetic
The new 10,000 sq ft space at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity is one of the few galleries that can accommodate works of his flamboyant size, which is so much at odds with the low-key personality of the Vishakapatnam-based artist.
- Bangkok:Devi , a large bronze head commissioned by the King of Thailand, bore witness to the Red Shirts’ protest against dictatorship in Bangkok in 2010. The Central World Shopping Centre, outside which it is displayed, was on fire, but the head, golden with a crimson mouth, survived.
- Bengaluru: RMZ Ecoworld, a work-leisure space in Bengaluru, acquired a gold head in bronze casting (made in 2015-17), also titled Devi . With vibrant red and white flowers enveloping its hairdo, it is part of a permanent display, along with works by artists such as Subodh Gupta and Paresh Maity.
- Chennai: An untitled eight-foot tall head has been on display at Phoenix Mall since 2013. On loan from the Apparao Gallery, it was earlier placed at The Lodhi, along with a nude by Reddy (the latter was removed after objections were made). Unlike a bronze casting, which Reddy finds time consuming, this is made with his favoured material, polyester resin fibreglass.
“I like feeling the sculptures while making them, I like the large volumes so both stretched hands can hold them,” says the 63-year-old, who sees himself, first and foremost, as a clay modeller, adding and subtracting material as he moulds the form. That Kolkata, where he is exhibiting such a large body of work for the first time, is an idol-maker’s city excites him. It is appropriate, he feels, to have his “ devis ”, or goddesses, shown here.
From their size, to the brightness and sheen of the colours that define form and texture even in natural light, Reddy’s first attempt is to “arrest the eyes”. There’s a repetition, in the focus with the heads, that have become his signature. “Like any artist, there’s a preoccupation with an aesthetic concern. He explores these to their fullest,” says Anupa Mehta, the Mumbai-based art consultant who curated the show. The early terracotta work with its westernised imagery gave way to a vernacular expression. Mehta points to the more elongated forms in his recent works, as well as their “less gendered, less sensualised” nature. In Shamla (2019), the sculptor, for the first time, makes a marked shift in his colour palette of red, blue, gold and copper. The grey tone, he says, came from the title, not just the name given to the goddess Kali, but also meaning dusk.
Timeless studies
Mehta had, in 2016 during the India Art Fair, curated a collection of Reddy’s nudes, but she and Emami Art director, Richa Aggarwal, made a conscious decision to exclude them from the Kolkata show. “It’s not easy to show nudes in a gallery. It’s the reality of the repressive times we live in,” she says. This is not a new restriction for Reddy; it is something he has come to terms with. “My freedom is in my studio,” says the artist, whose Devi II sold at last year’s Saffronart Auction for ₹23,67,000. “When I’m working, I’m all by myself. When I finish, 50% of my energy is over. I share my work and it brings me joy. But even if they were not to be shown, I’d not give up the idea of doing this, satisfying my inner urge to create.”
Immortality is what Reddy seeks for his sculptures; they are for him a study in “timelessness” and universality. Despite the regional, cultural and religious associations in the colours of skin, looks, or the titles he gives them — names shared by ordinary women and those from Hindu mythology — he says he aims to capture aspects that would allow the sculptures to “stand beyond time”. He juxtaposes the goddess-like imagery with that of everyday women, but the bright, robust faces are bereft of ‘experiences’. Portrait of a Migrant (2017), a woman with dusky blue skin carrying a bundle on her head, is not dissimilar to that of, say, Devi III (2016-17), with richer ornamentation. “I want to capture aspects that transcend these various shades of life, rather than a reality that will not stand the test of time,” he concludes.
Rasa will show at Emami Art till August 8.
