There used to be a museum in London called the Museum of Mankind that was shut down in 1997. It was an anthropological museum (like the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, itself reopened as recently as 2015) and it was here, sometime in the 1980s, that a young Ravinder Reddy got to hold a small Mexican figurine in his hands. It made him realise that this was possibly what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
One of the aspects of Reddy’s work that strikes you is the absence of mythological referencing at a time when much popular artistic imagery—visual, cinematic or literary—seems overwhelmed and asphyxiated by it.
The other is the absence of history. Talking about his choice of fibreglass as material, Reddy says he wanted to move beyond the apparent beauty of wood, granite or marble: “I started looking at industrial material, which has no preconceived aesthetics.” What the quiet, self-effacing artist produces out of this material shows a similar lack of baggage.
His sculptures, immense and primarily of women—vivid, lush, Rubenesque—stride out to us from the here and the now, from fish markets and bus stops and the doorways of houses we cross every day. And in this, they seem almost an anthropological record of the present. Reddy is intent on capturing the social and the quotidian—his figures carry bricks or sacks on their head, handbags and umbrellas on their arms. They wear hairclips and flowers in their hair and elaborate ear ornaments. They stand or bathe or squat or make love. And they do all of this in a sort of flaunting way, as if daring you to look.
After 15 years
It is the Vishakhapatnam-based sculptor’s first solo exhibition in 15 years. It is showing in Bangalore’s RMZ Ecoworld, which has also acquired his 12 ft Devi, and the back of her decorated head makes for an imposing entry into the gallery.
But we also see some of his smaller terracotta heads—Akshatyoni and Portrait of Woman—uncoloured, weathered, with a wood-like finish and sheen, and a fabulous quietness that is almost louder than his largest works. The shadow of the Benin bronzes is stronger here, a style that had originally engaged him in his early years when he was rebelling against Western forms.
Folk art was another inspiration. “I like their simplicity,” he says, “There is no duality. They say what they want to with minimum means. I learnt that.”
But Reddy transmutes the simple lines into rich artistic commentary. You could, for instance, say he borrows from temple reliefs but while his figures mime the voluptuousness of temple sculpture, they simultaneously seem to mock it—not just by their exaggerated enlargement but more importantly by their gaze. Here is no quiet, serene look but bulging eyes and an obtuse stare that makes it impossible to respond in any straightforward manner.
His female nudes are not coy—they don’t cover their breasts or vulvas—but their disturbing gaze reverses the voyeurism. The viewer is suddenly the one being watched, being asked, ‘What do you see? What do you want?’ Disconcertingly, this makes them simultaneously sexual and asexual, unselfconscious of their bodies but also unmistakably sensuous.
“The human form; that is my obsession,” Reddy says; it would be fair to narrow this to the female form. And it’s interesting how he renders the woman with a great degree of adoration but a complete lack of idealisation. These are women with fleshy stomachs and hips, ample arms and thighs and chubby faces.
“I am not looking for Greek idols,” he says, “I am trying to find the beauty this woman has.” He tells me the story of a crow that used to fly to his porch each morning. He would initially shoo it off, then he got used to it, then he began to find it beautiful. Beauty is familiarity, he implies, and it’s the closest we come to verbalising his artistic philosophy.
If I were to look for a visual counterpart to that, it would be the relief, Woman Bathing, where the artist’s ease and joy with sheer physicality is manifest—in the woman’s shiny skin, the folds of her flesh, her health, her ‘aliveness’, her gaze much gentler too.
This gentleness is seen again in the series of reliefs titled Couples, especially Couple II, where the man lies suppliant in post-coital sleep, the woman’s gaze deeply tender upon his foetal form. And in the Mother Goddess piece, this union is complete, echoing John Donne: ‘If they be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two.’
Immense but minimal
Ranging from 15 inches to 12 feet, his sculptures take four to six months to complete, but the immensity of work is in paring everything down to the bare minimum—addressing only the basic senses of touch, sight, emotion. Even his colours are strictly primary, with gold a recurring addition. The golden skin adds to the South Indian physiognomy of his women, recalling their turmeric washes.
Reddy’s works reference kitsch but leap over it with their larger-than-life presence, their rich undulations, and their defiance. A series of modern, urban women, for instance, could easily be off a shop signboard until, as with Laxma Goud, you notice their breasts and pubic hair through a transparent dress—casually sexual women owning what are clearly public spaces.
There’s another with blinding black sunglasses, legs crossed, body tightly repressed. It’s these recurring insurrections that make Reddy such a strong post-feminist, post-modern, and important voice, especially now. In his catalogue essay, Gulammohammed Sheikh notes how Reddy counters the stereotypes standardised “by a hegemonic ‘national’ discourse”.
The first fibreglass sculptor to be awarded by Lalit Kala in 1980, Reddy doesn’t see himself as doing something great or different. “All I am looking at is the work of art itself—its timelessness. I want to leave something where the immediate 30 or 50 years is not as important as a time beyond that.”
ON SHOW: Heads and Bodies, Icons and Idols, till Sept. 09, 2017, The Gallery, RMZ Ecoworld, Sarjapur, Bengaluru