Important Notice

“Music and indeed the performing arts have always been inextricably linked with Hebbar’s oeuvre, not just as a subject of his compositions but also as the guiding spirit of his life.”

Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar emerged from the coastal rhythms of Udupi, Karnataka, where early exposure to the tactility of clay, cultural traditions of ritual and music formed the grammar of his early imagination. Trained at the Sir J J School of... “Music and indeed the performing arts have always been inextricably linked with Hebbar’s oeuvre, not just as a subject of his compositions but also as the guiding spirit of his life.”

Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar emerged from the coastal rhythms of Udupi, Karnataka, where early exposure to the tactility of clay, cultural traditions of ritual and music formed the grammar of his early imagination. Trained at the Sir J J School of Art in Bombay and later at the Académie Julian in Paris, Hebbar negotiated an evolving modernism that held together the intimate and the universal, the folk and the formal. His art became a site of translation, between the rural memory of South India and the cosmopolitan vocabulary of 20th?century painting.

Though he was influenced by Western modernism, Hebbar’s art resisted its abstractionist rupture. His figures often verge on dissolution yet refuse disappearance. In them, one glimpses both empathy and restraint, a quiet dignity that transcends setting. Hebbar’s sensitivity to rhythm, perhaps drawn from his lifelong engagement with dance and Carnatic music, extends beyond representation into a meditative poise: the stillness before gesture, the pause before sound.

In this lot, we see how a certain musicality that pervaded his life gracefully flows through the body of the dancer depicted. The strong and marked lines choreograph her posture in a way that alludes to the dynamic movements that might have preceded, and will inevitably follow, this moment. Author and art critic Mulk Raj Anand aptly titles an essay on Hebbar’s visual language “The Singing Line”, in reference to the way his works carry the pulse of dance, labour, and movement in deft ways. “Of the curved line it has been said in ancient India that it achieves the condition of Music. So it has often been called a singing line. Certainly, it is the suggestive line, evocative of those harmonious movements of the nerve ends of the hand which ally the body?soul with lovable round shapes, particularly the sphere which encloses a portion of space and creates a coherent form.” (Mulk Raj Anand, The Singing Line, Bombay: Western Printers and Publishers, 1964)

The dancer’s clean form, and the strict lines of the body in conjunction with the right angled pillars forming the room around her, are in a dialectical dialogue with the knife?cut textured shadow and the curved tilt of her head. These pluralities and the restrained use of rich colours, create a work that is lyrical and alive all at once.

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