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NOVEMBER 2016 | THE TIES THAT BIND
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K K HEBBAR
(1911 - 1996)
Untitled
Signed and dated 'Hebbar 87' (lower right)
1987
Oil on canvas
29.75 x 40 in (75.8 x 101.8 cm)
$ 27,275 - 33,335
Rs 18,00,000 - 22,00,000
PROVENANCE:
Important Private Collection, North India
K K Hebbar’s later works, such as the present lot, often depicted
subjects he had explored in his early years, but rendered with
a “great freedom, simplification of treatment and a deeper
philosophical approach in his images.” (Rekha Rao and Rajani
Prasanna,
Hebbar: An Artist’s Quest
, Bengaluru: National Gallery of
Modern Art, 2011, p. 139) He was drawn to the rustic and humble
working classes, such as fisher folk, as seen in the present lot. One of
many paintings focussing on the sea and its elements, the present
lot demonstrates the artist’s particular blend of abstraction and
figuration. “Hebbar’s art begins with the visible world of realism
and culminates with the ephemeral and the intangible world of
abstraction. At no point, however does he completely abandon
the figurative – instead his abstraction is distilled from nature into
a clarity of form and texture that culminates in a grand simplicity
of colour and design.” (Rao and Prasanna, p. 31)
His preferred medium by the late 1980s was oil paint, as opposed
to the tempera technique he employed in the early 1940s and
’50s. He evokes the power and vastness of the ocean through
a masterful layering of paint. “Hebbar used titanium white as
an under coat as it has the highest tinting strength and most
opaque of all whites. He would sometimes scrape one layer of
paint to build up another to create a rich texture and finished
with brushwork and palette-knife to contribute to the scene
of spontaneity...This scintillating jewel bright flecks of pigment,
flickering between thickly applied layers of impasto, form the key
note to the signature style of K K Hebbar’s paintings.” (Rao and
Prasanna, p. 139)
“My works are generated by my intense feeling for my environment.
I seek to find myself and follow it to wherever it leads me.”
K K HEBBAR