Important Notice

Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar sought honest emotional expression through colour and line. Growing up in Karnataka, he immersed himself in the rich culture of folklore, folk art, and theatre. After training at the Chamarajendra Technical Institute, in Mysore, and J J School of Art, Bombay, he pursued further education at the Academy Julian, Paris. Mastering oil painting by 1941, he yearned for a personal artistic language.

Influenced by Ananda... Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar sought honest emotional expression through colour and line. Growing up in Karnataka, he immersed himself in the rich culture of folklore, folk art, and theatre. After training at the Chamarajendra Technical Institute, in Mysore, and J J School of Art, Bombay, he pursued further education at the Academy Julian, Paris. Mastering oil painting by 1941, he yearned for a personal artistic language.

Influenced by Ananda Coomaraswamy, the artist briefly explored gouache and tempera. His style evolved through travel and regular documentation. He toured South India in 1946 and Europe in 1949, gradually embracing abstraction and choreographic drawing. In 1958 - 1959, Hebbar travelled to the islands of Indonesia at the invitation of Dr. Roger Lewis from the World Health Organization and made a series of works that reflected the cultural life there. The present lot, painted in 1959, depicts a market scene and uses a compositional device that blocks shapes or forms to confine his objects.

Although the artist’s style went through transformations, his preoccupation with figures lent a humanistic approach to his practice. He affirmed, “The human figure, and human joy and sorrow, occupied an important place in my compositions. Because of my love for humanity in general and the working-class in particular…” (K K Hebbar, Voyage in Images, Mumbai: Jehangir Art Gallery, 1991) In the present lot, his treatment of space and the stylisation results in a scene with the disharmony of a crowd in the background while allowing the foreground its own undisturbed space. Of Hebbar’s humanistic canvases, K G Subramanyan reflects, “In some works he romanticized a scene and gave it a visionary air. In others he told a story or symbolized an event. Some of these events were topical, some timeless; some threw light on the plight of the underdog; some expressed his excitement over a world event like man’s conquest of space and the misgivings that came in its wake. They all came out as muted tapestries, coloured by a passion that was painless, that carried no shout of revolt but a sense of compassion.” (K G Subramanyan, “The Pleasure of Knowing Hebbar,” Hebbar: An Artist’s Quest, 2011, Bengaluru: NGMA and K K Hebbar Art Foundation, p. 16)

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