Laxma Goud

Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection

Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Paintings from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Charitable Trust, Part II, April 1996, lot 132 

N. Tuli, The Flamed Mosaic, Indian Contemporary Painting, Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad, 1998, illustration p. 164

There is minor wear and loss along the edges of the painting and scattered creasing throughout.
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Laxma Goud grew up in a remote and poor region of Andhra Pradesh where he was surrounded by a close-knit rural community who encouraged his talent for drawing. Goud went on to study at art school in Hyderabad and then in the mid-1960s he attended Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. Although he was exposed to the art work of many other artists, his subject-matter was always entrenched within his rural upbringing. 'This focus on the lived realities of his native locale aligned him with an actively growing movement centred in Baroda that privileged and explored everyday existence and subjective experience.' (S. Bean, Midnight to the Boom, Painting in India after Independence, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London and Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts, 2013, p. 148). Many of Goud's works carry an erotic undertone. "We come from a culture which spoke openly about the man-woman relationship, about fertility. When it recurs in a contemporary context, why should anyone pull a face? I am continuing that discourse, ... I am trying to understand it in aesthetic terms, not for its thrill... Whether the eyes see it or not, there is eroticism in nature itself. Some see it through the senses even when it is not seen by the eyes. And there it becomes an obsession... Overt eroticism may not be before us, but the positive and negative confronting each other is something we find everywhere... It is the organic no the organism that I depict... I want to stress the organic relationship between human and animal. You don't raise a goat - or any domestic animal - to cut it and eat it; you do so for the whole relationship." (Laxma Goud in conversation with Ratnottama Sengupta, Times of India, New Delhi, April 1995).