Important Notice

Lot 107

An incisive draughtsman, K. Laxma Goud was born in rural Andhra Pradesh in 1940. Drawing extensively on his rural childhood experiences in the creation of his drawings, prints and sculptures, the people and images of the artist`s village, Nizampur, are popular subjects in his work.

“There were wonderful story tellers in my village, they would create an imagined world… There was only a visual image in it…words became nothing…such... An incisive draughtsman, K. Laxma Goud was born in rural Andhra Pradesh in 1940. Drawing extensively on his rural childhood experiences in the creation of his drawings, prints and sculptures, the people and images of the artist`s village, Nizampur, are popular subjects in his work.

“There were wonderful story tellers in my village, they would create an imagined world… There was only a visual image in it…words became nothing…such imaginings bear a lot of impact on my work. In my work certain experiences impressed in my mind during childhood have taken shape. To produce my kind of art is like ruminating on certain experiences… try to go deeper into the object, to X-ray it to show the very essence of it and its relations to other objects. I am convinces that this and nothing else is my duty as an artist” (K. Laxma Goud quoted in Susan S. Bean, Timeless Visions: Contemporary Art of India, Peabody Essex Museum Exhibition Catalogue, p. 22).

Though his works spring from very personal and localized sources, the narratives that Goud weaves into them are universal and enduring. In this partially coloured drawing, the artist presents his viewers with a nostalgic scene, sure to be familiar to almost every rural Indian child – picking ripe mangoes straight off the tree. However, in this instance, a buxom village belle replaces mischievous children, highlighting the uninhibited sexuality of the village that Goud sought to bring to light through his art. One of the artist`s objectives was “to emancipate the elite from their sexual inhibitions and restore the frank eroticism that existed when Hindu erotic temple sculptures were produced” (Partha Mitter, Indian Art Today, The Philips Collection Exhibition Catalogue, 1986, p. 13).

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