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Combining the high art of religious sculptures and gilded icons with the loud kitsch of Indian bazaar and cinema culture, G. Ravinder Reddy offers his viewers a unique perspective on both historical and contemporary India through his sculptures of the female head and form. “Reddy’s sculptures reference both traditional India and contemporary Indian popular culture…The combination of the traditional and the new extends to the artist’s working... Combining the high art of religious sculptures and gilded icons with the loud kitsch of Indian bazaar and cinema culture, G. Ravinder Reddy offers his viewers a unique perspective on both historical and contemporary India through his sculptures of the female head and form. “Reddy’s sculptures reference both traditional India and contemporary Indian popular culture…The combination of the traditional and the new extends to the artist’s working methods as well – he fashions his models in clay, but his final sculptures are made of fiberglass, which may easily be embellished with paints (he prefers car paint) and metallic leafs and given the look of almost any real material” (Margery King, Ravinder Reddy, The Andy Warhol Museum exhibition catalogue, Pittsburgh, 2001, not paginated).

To Reddy, women exemplify the definitive source of life and growth, and through his monumental sculptures, he pays homage to their sacredness, sensuality, fertility and power. The present lot, a voluminous gilded head with kohl lined eyes, large lips and elaborately arranged hair, articulates both elegant refinement and wide-eyed defiance of the patriarchal gaze that women are so often subject to. Like his other sculptures, this lot represents not only the everyday woman, but also the goddess, mother, wife and lover; expectantly facing the future, no matter what it may hold.

“Reddy’s often larger-than-life heads…with their potent presence, simultaneously exude a sense of the actual, the mythic and the organic…The almost familiar expressions of vivacity, sexual fulfillment and self-delight sometimes exude naivety, sometimes wisdom and make the images accessible and palpable, a little lovingly amusing, whereas the immobile vastness of their eyes stylized on canonic art endows them with an aura of inscrutability and gravity…The bonding of the intimately direct and ritually monumental is achieved largely due to the pliant neutrality of the fiberglass which follows the dual import of the artist’s hand as it captures the impact of a live flesh and the grandeur of a divine statue” (Marta Jakimowicz, The Human Figure, Gallery Threshold exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2006, p. 22).

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