Village Deity

Arriving on the art scene at a time when the country was emerging from years of colonial slavery, there seemed not enough worlds for an artist like P. T. Reddy to traverse. Academically trained, Reddy studied the Ajanta frescoes for their flat treatment of form and colour, was avowedly modernist, but with a rare sensuousness of imagery borrowed from folk art. Village Deity appears as a complex composition, which is evocatively created through Reddy’s rich command on colour, line, and form, emerging from a folk-tantric idiom.