k. laxma goud

K. Laxma Goud was born in 1940 in Nizampur, Andhra Pradesh, and studied at the College of Fine Arts and Architecture, Hyderabad and the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda. Since 1965 he has held several one-man shows in India and abroad. He has also participated in several important national and international exhibitions including Contemporary Indian Art, Royal Academy of Art, London (1982), Contemporary Indian Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York (1985), Indian Art Tomorrow, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC (1986), Contemporary Art of India: The Herwitz Collection, Worcester Art Museum (1986), Wounds, Center of International Modern Art, Calcutta and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (1993).

Over the years, K. Laxma Goud has moved from one medium to another with ease, over a range of media, from etching, gouache and pastels, to glass paintings. Painting everyday scenes peopled with strong village men and women, with the power of his lines, in black and white or in colour, is eloquent in its expression. These works may represent a moment extracted from the flow, they are not strongly narrative, and freeze – frames from an encounter, but as nostalgic scenes of village life. The nostalgia is that of a city dweller for the ancestral place left behind, but it is also a temporal nostalgia, a romantic longing, for a bucolic simplicity and purity that exists no more, if it ever really did. Such images are not only one kind of engagement with time in Goud’s work, which is remarkably varied and playful in its approaches.

Watching K. Laxma Goud steer a line on paper or on an etching plate is like watching a river charting an unknown course, curving and bending, as it reclaims open lands, its ebb and movement controlled only by the strength of a mounting tide.

In the’ 60s and 70s, Goud used the resources of the fluid line to compose  intimate land-scapes, while in the ‘80s, he conjured up buxom female forms and composite anthropomorphic creatures. Goud’s pantheistic beliefs informed his early work : most of the figures were drawn from Indian mythology and from the natural world. Goud’s works are characterized by deep dark patches of black and contrasting white negative spaces : they are replete with bold erotic content. Goud found inspiration in the immediacy and openness of rustic life in his native village, and found release in working with overt sexual imagery. One can see Goud’s passion for the human from in his drawings and etchings : he has used a variety of cross-hatching techniques on paper and scratches and incisions on the plate to convey the potency of sexual energy. In his later prints, he incorporated aquatint, which tended to give his subjects a softer feel. The works that followed depicted men and women tenderly cradled by their surroundings, locked in a kind of poetic exchange.

Goud has applied his technical skill to various other media and has gained a mastery and excellence in painting, sculpture as well as printmaking.