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Saffronart | Evening Sale
K K Hebbar
© Jyoti Bhatt
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K K Hebbar’s work often reflected the socio‒political environment
of his time, whether it was his depiction of poverty, hunger, war, and
strife, or his personal and artistic fascination with the advances in
space technology. According to art historian Veena K Thimmaiah, “His
meditative images of nature combined with the gravitas of his social
conscience displays a breath taking power of visual analysis.” (Rekha
Rao and Rajani Prasanna,
Hebbar: An Artist’s Quest
, Bengaluru: National
Gallery of Modern Art, 2011, p. 20) Hebbar’s works often combined
the abstract with the figurative, integrating “the representational, the
metaphysical, the suggestive and symbolic” to achieve, in his own words,
“inner satisfaction.” (K K Hebbar,
Voyage in Images
, Mumbai: Jehangir Art
Gallery, 1991, unpaginated)
War and social strife were always of interest to the artist, leading
him to create some of his most emotionally charged works, which
are connected by their imagery and colour, even though they are
interspersed over a span of several decades. In 1971, Hebbar created a
series of paintings, such as
Atrocity
and
Refugees
, which expressed his
distress at the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War. He treated
these works in what he termed “an abstract‒expressionist slant,” using
contrasting colours and forms to depict images of horror. “Time and
again, I have tried to depict the subjective aspects of poverty, hunger
and imperfection.” (Hebbar, unpaginated) Similarly, Hebbar created a
work titled
War and Peace
in 1977, which depicted a green tree in the
foreground offset by an explosive red cloud against a black background.
The symbolic juxtaposition of the life‒giving tree against the destructive
explosion is plainly evident, and speaks volumes of the political
environment of the time when India was just withdrawing from its two‒
year long period of Emergency.
The present lot, painted in 1991, possibly as a response to the Kargil
War, is also titled
War and Peace
. The colours are far richer and lyrical,
presenting an almost magnified and even more abstract variation on his
earlier work of the same title. The red explosion stands in much more
stark contrast beside the flourishing green suggestion of the tree, while a
Daughter Rekha, Hebbar and wife Susheela
Image courtesy of the Hebbar family