G. Ravinder Reddy

Born in 1956 in Suryapet, Andhra Pradesh, Ravinder Reddy completed a bachelor’s of fine arts in sculpture and a master’s of arts in creative sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, among other short diploma courses. Reddy currently teaches at the Department of Fine Art, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam.

Ravinder Reddy, the master sculptor, has a distinguished style that establishes him as a celebrity Indian Artist. Ravinder Reddy’s sculpture is heraldic. Many of his sculptures are larger than life heads. Invariably, they look frontally through wide-open eyes, the characteristic attitude of one who proclaims. None of the sculptures looks sideways, or over the shoulder. The one who predicts may draw material from the past, but he has only the future to address. And the message, or prediction, that is about to be announced can be read from sculpture to sculpture in the gold emblazoning, or the searing red which covers the head, or in the complex hair-dos on the female heads, all of which are emblematic designs.

Most of his prominent sculptures depict spectacular eyes. The admirers get a unique presentation of wide and bold eyes in most of his popular exhibits. A sense of familiarity is yet another distinctive feature of the artist’s creations. The viewers can easily relate to the sculptors as they find them very familiar to them. Instead of using mythical images, the artist depicts images of common men and women in his works. Certainly, this idea brings him a different identity.

Besides the fusion of contemporary pop art and Hindu sculptural tradition, Reddy provides a union of the archetype and the individual and like Cotter has noted, it feels more like “folk” art than “fine” art.

Sculpture is a welling upward of a world of images from the flat and even surface in which they were earlier concealed. The sculptor merely unveils them, or so it would seem. This sense of apparent effortlessness goes hand in hand with the emotional and structural informality of Reddy’s latest works.

He was one of the first contemporary Indian artists to draw critical attention in America following his show at Deitch Projects in 2001. New York Times Art Critic Holland Cotter said in a review of Reddy’s first solo show in New York, “The spirelike roofs of certain Hindu temples in South India are a dizzying pileup of hundreds of brightly painted carved figures. Most are of deities, but the ever-changing mix can also include politicians, movie idols and even an occasional Westerner of local renown. This blending of religion and pop culture is a constant in Indian art, and it is the impetus behind the work of Ravinder G. Reddy. His painted and gilded fiberglass sculptures of women have been among of the most visible examples of contemporary South Asian art since they first made a splash in ‘Traditions/Tensions’ at the Asia Society in 1996.”

He appears in collections such as that of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts, USA; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; Frank Cohen Collection, UK; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, USA; and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; in addition to attracting attention at various international contemporary art auctions.

The artist lives and works in Vishakhpatnam and Hyderabad.