Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar

Saffronart, Modern Indian Art, 8 May 2003, lot 4

The tradition of studio painting and its portrayal in compositions is centuries-old. From Las Meninas (1956), the masterpiece by Diego Velázquez, The Painter’s Studio (1855) by Gustave Courbet to Henri Matisse’s foundational The Red Room (1911), master artists have been inspired by the practice of painting in the studio and their own environment as a subject. In Untitled (Studio Scene), Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar continues this tradition and depicts his own rendition of the artist's studio, while adding many of his distinctive, painterly qualities. Using the palette knife to create his signature textured effect, the background colour fields and foregrounded protagonists are executed with expressive, confident strokes. The artist stands at work, their stance echoing the grounded legs of the easel. A palette peeks from behind the canvas, pointing towards a table laid with paint tubes, and an attending woman. 

Hebbar was a master of distillation, condensing an environment or an idea into an abstracted landscape or lively portrait of daily life. Along the top of Hebbar’s canvas is a row of figures, painted through lyrical lines, full of vitality and movement, for which he came to be known. This band of figures could represent the painter’s ideas while studio painting, recalling remnants and memories of his life as swirling vignettes.

Hebbar painted several portraits throughout his oeuvre, including one of artist Narayan Shridhar Bendre painting at his easel, which sold at Sotheby’s New York in March 2024 for $304,800 against a pre-sale estimate of $70,000-90,000, currently the second-highest international auction record for the artist. The present work, depicting an anonymous artist in his environment, is perhaps a rare self-portrait of Hebbar himself.