Shock to impress

Time was when you couldn’t walk through the India Art Fair without stumbling across Ravinder Reddy’s sculptures, but his works have been noticeably fewer in the public eye of late. Not that the appetite for his robust sculptures is any less — Reddy’s works command both value and the market — so perhaps one can speculate that the artist has taken time off to return with a fresh collection. Since collectors are mostly loath to place his works in auctions — even succeeding generations seem to connect well with the artist — it accounts for fewer Reddys in the marketplace. An outing, therefore — a three-decade retrospective, in a manner of speaking, at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity — is good news and spans his changing styles and mediums all the way from terracotta in 1989 to fibreglass in 2019. His previous show in Bengaluru in 2017 was his first solo in a decade. 

The 63-year-old sculptor, who lives in Vishakhapatnam, began his career with an exhibition in New Delhi and soon found recognition across Europe and the US — major museums have since collected his work. A scholarship in London seems to have pointed him towards discovering his own aesthetic context, leading to his proclivity with the female body and its wide-eyed naivety combined with equally blatant sexuality. Deviating from the norm of popular culture, he invests the female body with a corpulence that is fleshy and voluptuous. It is the scale of his work that provides it with its shock value. The full gaze and red lips communicate an overtness that can prove unnerving. The neatly coiffed hair is sprinkled with flowers. In anybody else’s hands, the work would have been rendered venerable; in Reddy’s manipulation of the figure it becomes charismatic and heraldic. These figures are less goddess, more earthy temptresses. 

Though they appear to have a talismanic quality, these totemic sculptures owe less to tradition than one may assume. Yet, they represent, ironically, a sense of continuity, an organic furtherance of what might have existed before. These unlikely — some might even say threatening — women are representations from the everyday, with neither mythological nor historical manifestations. And yet, they would not be out of place as yakshis in a panoply of medieval sculptures. It is a moot point whether Reddy thinks of this when he is feasting his fingers and moulding clay to provide shape to what will become his iconic polyester resin fibreglass emblems. 

Much of Reddy’s work focusses on the head, and it is often blown up to dwarf the viewer. He limits the details, preferring red, gold and a few primary colours which serve to highlight the brilliant black of their hair. And it is this back of the head that gets detailed treatment with tiny blossoms wreathed into the tresses. The result is a sexuality that is suggested rather than overt, arising from a familiarity of the ordinary rather than a voyeuristic impulse.

In recent years, Reddy has chosen to experiment with relief-like sculptures representing the modern family, though it is anyone’s guess whether they have the same impact as his female heads. But they do provide a popular, pop convention to his practice and are subversive not in themselves, but in how they “place” the viewer at the crossroads of interrogation. The subject here is less heroic, but the addition of the urban into his lexicon has introduced a fresh element to his practice. Whether it is a direction he will explore fully, time will tell. Meanwhile, for those of his admirers who find his prices steep, the affordability of his edition pieces can ensure their wider reach among even a young collectorati.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated