Important Notice

Born in Kattingeri in Udupi district, Karnataka, K K Hebbar grew up within the rich cultural landscape of South Kanara, where ritual, performance, folklore and mythology existed in abundance. The region’s tradition of Yakshagana Bayalata, a form of open‒air dance‒drama rooted in episodes from Hindu epics and mythology, provided him with an early visual and theatrical vocabulary. The Puram festival, with its array of caparisoned... Born in Kattingeri in Udupi district, Karnataka, K K Hebbar grew up within the rich cultural landscape of South Kanara, where ritual, performance, folklore and mythology existed in abundance. The region’s tradition of Yakshagana Bayalata, a form of open‒air dance‒drama rooted in episodes from Hindu epics and mythology, provided him with an early visual and theatrical vocabulary. The Puram festival, with its array of caparisoned elephants and night‒long fireworks, was among the many local festivities that Hebbar later recalled as providing him with rich material to paint. The present lot revisits this formative cultural environment and, more intimately, his father’s practice of making Ganesha idols during festivals. Hebbar later recalled his fascination with the folk plays of Kattingeri, where “gods and demons” appeared amid “exotic costumes and make‒up” and “enchanting music.” (S I Clerk and K K Hebbar, “A Memoir on the Work of a Painter in India,” ,i>Leonardo, vol. 11, no. 1, 1978, p. 3, online) At home, he attempted to recreate these impressions on his walls with earth pigments, translating the sensory world around him into images from an early age. This early engagement with the traditions of his childhood continued to inform Hebbar’s practice, as he later wrote: “I wished deliberately to sink my roots deeper, go into the past and seek a link rather than imitate the modern trends.” (Artist quoted in V R Amberkar, Hebbar: An Artist’s Quest, K G Subramanyan, Veena K Thimmaiah et al, Bengaluru: NGMA and K K Hebbar Art Foundation, 2011, p. 6)

That link between inheritance and modernity is palpable in the present Ganesha, where Hebbar subjects a familiar sacred form to the formal vocabulary he developed through decades of experimentation. The figure of the Hindu god is articulated through a network of looping, curving lines, giving the compact form a sense of continuous movement, reminiscent of his line drawings. Hebbar’s engagement with Indian dance offers a further dimension to this fluidity: having studied Kathak for two years, he recalled that the training helped him in “infusing rhythmic quality into my works.” (Artist in Amberkar, p. 12) Ganesha’s animated contours embody this understanding of line as movement, while the saturated red of the trunk stands out in the predominantly earthy surface. Hebbar’s inner urge to express through colour, which he described as having driven him to Bombay, remained central to his artistic practice. In 1970, while listening to Yehudi Menuhin, he was inspired to express sound in colour seeking to create music on canvas through the “pure expressive quality of colour.” (Artist in Amberkar, p. 12) In the present lot, colour works in concert with line, allowing the familiar sacred image to acquire a visual rhythm and vitality rooted in Hebbar’s engagement with the cultural world of his childhood yet expressed through his modernist vocabulary.

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