CHANDIGARH, Dec 21: A perusal of Balbir Katt’sresume is in itself an unwinding journey. Beginning at Shantiniketan, the vita takes you across the globe through his sculptures installed in places as far as Oulu in Finland and Ashdod in Israel, finally bringing you to the Benaras Hindu University, where he heads the Faculty of Visual Arts.
And when Balbir speaks about his long and illustrious career in the realm of sculpture, it is again a kind of voyage through the various facets and aspects of contemporary India.
The first audio-visual lecture at the Art Gallery focused on sculpture, mainly contemporary, and quite expectedly there were Balbir’s Flower of the Seas (an unconscious geometrical form to suit Corbusier’s city), Shiv Singh’s resonant jungle in his customary black and Latika Katt’s relaxing dogs welcoming the visitor to the gallery.
Balbir, whose sculptures adorn several prestigious landmarks in Delhi, dedicated his visit to Shiv Singh, for having brought the Punjabi sensibility back into his Bengali mindscape. “Though sculpture was our main ancient form of art, it was slowly taken over by paintings, with the arrival of miniatures,” Balbir pointed out to the audience, comprising city’s leading artists and art aficionados.
“Sculpture, as a medium, had lost all social relevance, for it came to be restricted to the temples of south India, with the sensibility for sculptures totally lacking in north Indian regions,” he said. Balbir also delved into the reasons for the decline. “Sculpture is unyielding, bulky and non-expressive as compared to the easy way of painting.”
But he noted that sculpture had staged a comeback in a modern garb. “Though contemporary Indian sculpture is an offshoot of the contemporary world sculpture, we are not artists because of the British presence or the Western influence, but because we belong to this country, a vast reservoir of traditional art,” he said. Balbir also stressed the point during the lecture, asking the youngsters to look within the country’s folk lore and myth, instead of seeking foreign fables.