Important Notice

“The human figure, and human joy and sorrow, occupied an important place in my compositions.” - K K HEBBAR

A pioneer of Indian modernism, K K Hebbar was an artist who discovered a world of art outside his own and found ways to incorporate his experience into his own expression. Hebbar's works often combined the abstract with the figurative, integrating the representational, the metaphysical, the suggestive and symbolic to achieve,... “The human figure, and human joy and sorrow, occupied an important place in my compositions.” - K K HEBBAR

A pioneer of Indian modernism, K K Hebbar was an artist who discovered a world of art outside his own and found ways to incorporate his experience into his own expression. 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)

His practice was deeply rooted in the folk-art traditions of his home state of Karnataka. People, especially the working classes, were central to Hebbar's practice, and appear either as the protagonists of the works or populating the larger landscape, engaged with their daily labour or gracefully engrossed in lighter revelries. Hebbar "tried to bring out the active life-spirit within India's rustic village folk, the poor and the ordinary people of his surroundings." (Pran Nath Mago, "Some Consequential Contemporary Artists of India," Contemporary Art in India: A Perspective, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2001, p. 147)

Hebbar's agility with the line, be it in drawing or painting, is matched only by the grace of the figures those lines animate. The unique visual language of Hebbar's work stems from his deep grounding in the culture and traditional arts of Karnataka, particularly those of dance, drama and music that he encountered growing up in the picturesque village of Kattingeri. "Even as a child... Hebbar was captivated by the songs and dances and dazzlingly colourful costumes of Yakshagana, the folk play of coastal Karnataka... Song and dance and colour have remained interwoven in his mind ever since." (H Y Sharada Prasad, The Book I Won't be Writing and Other Essays, New Delhi: D C Publishers, 2003, p. 215)

This is particularly noted in Untitled (Prosperity), a work from the latter half of his artistic career - a period wherein Hebbar "turned from a simple abstraction of colours and lines to searching for the spiritual." (Rekha Rao and Rajani Prasanna, An Artist's Quest: K K Hebbar - A Retrospective, Bengaluru: NGMA and K K Hebbar Art Foundation, 2011, p. 30) He began using oils instead of his preferred medium of tempera and started adding a layer of titanium white below the oils, and then scraping away the paint to create textured surfaces.

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