Ravinder Reddy

Woman is the most enduring theme in Reddy's oeuvre. The gargantuan heads and life size and larger nudes, with their very familiar and ungainly physiologies, are vividly erotic. But the this-worldly sensuality of their bodies coexists with the other-worldly gaze of their large unblinking eyes. By becoming dichotomous, Reddy's Woman stalls from delivering Herself as the desired object to the viewer. Her disembodied eyes, alternately all possessing and unseeing, transform her into a formidable apparition or a comic spectacle. It gives her iconic grandeur or turns her into a mocking parody of the viewer, a gentle teaser of his/our psychic and cultural habits. With rounded volumes and chiselled details, sporting flamboyant coiffeurs, Reddy's Woman is ethnic, distinctly common, and - suspended between the urban and the rural - a cultural hybrid. Gilded and painted, She is kitsch incarnate. But Reddy's Woman is also nonchalant and She storms into metropolitan sanctuaries of highbrow culture with a cool subaltern élan.
(R. Siva Kumar)

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