Important Notice

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,... 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 symbolic rivulet of red runs between the two. By the 1990s, Hebbar had developed his painting technique and used impasto in multiple layers of contrasting colours on the canvas. "The colours gleam like a thousand gems or smoulder like the embers of a dying fire, scintillating in the light. He loved the feeling of vibrant colours appearing in minute cracks and pin pricks through a thick layer of a contrasting colour." (Rao and Prasanna, p. 27)

The present lot exemplifies Hebbar's signature style of employing textured layers on the canvas, allowing broken flecks of paint to emerge in bursts out of its depth. "Hebbar's art begins with the visible world of realism and culminates with the ephemeral and the intangible world of abstraction... his abstraction is distilled from nature into a clarity of form and texture that culminates in a grand simplicity of colour and design. At his peak he had mastered the art of separating the superfluous from the essential. It is in these works of his autumn years, that he truly converts painting into music - the brushstrokes and the colours being reborn as the manifestations of universal energy." (Rao and Prasanna, p. 31)

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