In Search of the Perfect Image

Ravinder Reddy is known for his heads. Across four decades they have become some of the most recognisable images in Indian art, arresting audiences from the Jaipur Literature Festival at home to New York, where they first drew American acclaim at the Asia Society in the 1990s. Few artists have done more to render the contemporary Indian head instantly legible. Monumental in scale, they meet the eye without flinching; proportioned almost past the point of the human, they carry a bearing close to the divine, and rather than turn aside or steal a glance over the shoulder they confront the viewer squarely, with the frontal composure of an idol, or of a herald. A long inheritance gathers in their features: the fixed stare of Mesopotamian votives, the stillness of the Indus Valley, the full-cheeked serenity of the yakshis of Mathura. Writers have reached for these lineages since his earliest showings. Look closely, however, and no two of these heads are twins. A proportion tightens here and eases there; above all, the sringar shifts from one work to the next. Jasmine is wound through the hair; the primaries Reddy has long trusted are tempered now with pastel; a ponytail yields to a braid, and the braid to one plaited more elaborately still; a jewel rests at the nose. With the years his sensuality has grown more avowed, and with it the conviction that such beauty asks to be adorned, in the old parampara of sringar, the ornament one reserves for an idol. There is an aptness in Reddy opening Gallery Sumukha's thirtieth anniversary year. Founded in August 1996, the gallery comes of age in step with this exhibition. Sumukha is no stranger to his work, and has shown him over the decades. He returns to it now with a body of work that anyone who has followed him will know at a glance, and that registers, all the same, every turn the practice has taken in the years between.

Anish Gawande