Latika Katt, one of India’s most prolific sculptors, passes away at 76

Before making nationalist sculptures, Katt was intentional successful her tract visits, investigating upwind directions and mapping perspectives, sometimes adjacent 16-feet beneath ground. It’s evident successful the 20-ft bronze sculpture of Nehru astatine the Jawahar Bhawan successful Delhi, wherever she captured him releasing pigeons into the skies.

Being a sculptor was her calling. She felt it the infinitesimal the unsmooth texture of a histrion bark passed done her hands successful her 2nd twelvemonth of good arts astatine Banaras Hindu University. Painting was excessively elemental and didn’t necessitate immoderate engagement dissimilar clay and wood which 1 had to physically interact with. To poke, scrap, knead and spot the mean successful manus meant the assemblage became portion of the enactment of making.

Katt was known for her quality to seizure the essence of quality successful its integrated forms. (Photos: Delhi Art Gallery)

Her master’s astatine MS University, Baroda, and a probe assistance from the Slade School of Art, London, gave her the needed impetus arsenic a sculptor. From the cattle dung connected Varanasi ghats to the histrion trunks astatine MSU, Katt was consenting to experimentation with each kinds of mediums. Her past teacher and precocious hubby Balbir Singh Katt would beryllium instrumental successful this exploration of materials.

While her bronze sculpture ‘Makarsankranti Nahan astatine Dashaswamedh Ghat’ (for which she won the Beijing Art Biennale Award successful 2010) shows figures successful the everydayness of life, the bronze effect connected the ‘Banana Tree’ curves up similar heavy fingers clinging together. Her Rodin-esque faces of well-known people, including artists specified arsenic Ramkinkar Baij and Somnath Hore, writer Mulk Raj Anand and leaders similar Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, person stories of their own.

In a nationalist lecture astatine the Lalit Kala Akademi Chandigarh successful 2013 she shared however Baij, the begetter of modern sculpture successful India, was initially unsure if this 45-kg petite miss could negociate making his portrait. But implicit Rabindra Sangeet and drinks, helium was yet blessed erstwhile helium saw the layered, rugged attraction she gave his face.

Conceptual creator and lensman Diwan Manna and erstwhile president of the Punjab Lalit Kala Akademi, says “She ever met challenges head-on. Being a sculptor is hard work, you request the stamina and vigour, your hands tin get burnt oregon your fingers grazed, you request to enactment successful the antithetic geographies and climate, often retired successful the open, and Latika was ever acceptable for it. She was a fighter, who stood up against thing she recovered unpalatable. I was, perhaps, 1 of the fewer radical whom she has ne'er had a combat with! Art is emotion and she worked intensely with her hands. There is simply a definite enslaved you person with the mean itself, the unit of the hammer, the alteration of a contour and each emotion plays retired connected the last product. And successful Latika’s enactment you tin spot that kinetic energy.”