Around the world it's considered high art, but in India it still has to cut through the clutter of being viewed as craft.
If the Delhi government is upbeat about the forthcoming Commonwealth Games, at least part of it has to do with the facelift the city is getting which, besides infrastructure, will include a mandate for city “beautification” by way of urban graffiti and sculpture. Earlier attempts along this line have been controversial — the recent steel Sprouts by designer Vibhor Sogani at the AIIMS grade separator haven’t won popular favour — or horrendous, as when Jagmohan turned every roundabout in the city into a trashy, multi-media monstrosity, though this, of course, was during the Emergency. But even though the capital city might be ready for its tryst with sculpture, it remains to be seen what the arts selection committee will pick by way of its representation.
There’s no gainsaying that India has a rich tradition of sculpture, from the minimalist Dancing Girl excavated from Mohenjodaro to the elegant Chola bronzes of south India to the voluptuous stone sculptures of north Indian temple architecture. But under the British, and later in independent India, sculpture came to signify political likenesses in the mould of Ram Sutar or Ram Sutar-like statues in city parks and on streetsides. But almost no gallery took the risk of doing sculpture shows so that while painting has found acceptance as well as a strong measure of liquidity, sculptors have remained largely ignored and on the fringes of the art movement of the last decade.
Contextually, it isn’t difficult to understand. At a time when art was anything but a mainstream activity, it was cheaper to paint because making sculptures required a greater financial outlay for buying materials and for hiring workshops and assistants to help with the process. So, though the likes of Ramkinkar Baij had given a great fillip to this form of art by creating iconic sculptures such as the Santhal Family in concrete in Santiniketan, ironically it was the “Santiniketan” school of “mother and child” stone or wood sculptures adopted across the country, churned out like factory clones, that went on to sound the death knell for free-thinking sculptors. In a more buoyant environment, when the collector saw nothing new, he concentrated his focus on paintings, as a result of which sculptors found no market for their work. In time, sculpture began to be viewed as something merely decorative, competing for eyeballs against assembly-line candle stands and glass vases. In this unfair environment, the sculptor’s price appeared unviable.
And yet, artists have always created sculptures, whether the Tagores earlier, or Somnath Hore, Sankho Chaudhuri, Vinayak Pandurang Karmakar, Himmat Shah, Dhruva Mistry, Laxma Goud or Satish Gujral at the peak of their careers. But with neither collectors nor institutions taking them seriously, it has been a long haul for Indian sculptors to find space in galleries, exhibitions or even in museums, the National Gallery of Modern Art included.
The few sculptors who have remained true to their art, and not given it up for forays into the world of canvas and easier pickings, have started to occupy growing mind space among the world of collectors. Or perhaps it is the bedlam over installations that makes sculpture seem easier to comprehend, which has thrust it into the limelight. Or perhaps it is the fact that with the crore-rupee barrier breached by a sculptor a couple of years back, it seems at last to have a leg to finally stand on.
At the top of the heap, therefore, is Ravinder Reddy whose gigantic-sized, luridly-painted fibreglass sculptures of women’s torsos and faces — temptresses or goddesses, your choice! — have created a fresh vocabulary that is rooted in an Indian sentimentality, yet with global significance. Reddy’s Radha sold for almost Rs 1.5 crore, making it the most expensive sculpture by an Indian artist (discounting a one-off piece, a 12 ft high Shiva bronze by artist Satish Gupta, that allegedly also sold for Rs 1.5 crore in a private sale), excluding, of course, works by India-born but British resident Anish Kapoor whose humungous steel sculptures are talking points around the world, and are as monumentally expensive.
Though K S Radhakrishnan has his legions of collectors in India, a large body of his bronze work is overseas, principally in France. Radhakrishnan’s muse is the two characters “Musui” and “Maiya”, playful spirits he has created that he uses constantly, setting them apart even among works that are busy with little figures. Having reduced many of the works to a more manageable “tabletop” size, he is a coveted sculptor, and his works are with India’s major collectors, and a significant work, Ramp, is part of Neville Tuli’s Osian’s archive in Mumbai.
Among stalwarts, Mrinalini Mukherjee has her place for the most experimentation with mediums such as hemp being knotted to create large anthropomorphic deities, while Goa’s Subodh Kerkar uses parts of abandoned boats to create sculptures (something he might find more challenging as it becomes increasingly difficult to find wooden boats, since fishermen are now increasingly using factory-made fibreglass vessels). There are still those who straddle both mediums of painting and sculpture, such as Ved Gupta or Chintan Upadhyaya, or others like Shanthi Swaroopini, whose bronze figures of women are rapidly demanding space — space that gallerists will have to give them as collectors begin to realise that sculpture has at least as much value as painting. For now, it’s certainly available for less, which alone should have the smart collector rethink his collecting options.
