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Dec 20, 1999
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SPECIAL SERIES Ravindra Reddy, 43
Sculptor
TALKING
HEAD
If there's a fetish as an art-form, Ravindra Reddy must
be its premier practitioner. You see, Reddy lives, breathes and creates heads,
progressively more artistic, progressively larger, through which the soft-spoken sculptor
makes a heck of a loud noise about feminine stature. Sculpted with clay, plaster, couched
in a fibre-glass shell, his heads are as much conversation pieces as must-shows and
must-haves. "He has come a long way from the experiments with the confrontational
urban yakshis to give a touch of the native idiom in his works," says painter C.
Suryaprakash on Reddy's transition from his early days as student of sculpture in
Vadodara.
His wider focus in recent years include subjects like the fisherwomen near
Visakhapatnam where he teaches at the department of fine arts of Andhra University. The
broadening range in these works has brought Reddy to the edge of a new drive even as some
critics complain that he has remained static. "My future figures will focus on Indian
identity as revealed in the day to day life of our women and how they relate to nature,
instead of trying to follow the post-modernism trend abroad." In other words, he will
let the heads talk.
-Amarnath
K.Menon |
