DLN, Unfettered

An Essay by Kirtana Thangavelu

This show features works from the family collection of DLN Reddy. Most of them have never been exhibited before. The works are testimony to the fierce commitment of the artist to his practice for over five decades; they reveal several of the obsessions that have haunted him through those years.

Even a cursory listing of the two-dimensional works can be revealing: lithographs, aquatints, and etchings; drawings and paintings with pencil, crayons, pastels, pen, ink, acrylic, charcoal, water color and coffee stain on reverse glass, paper, canvas, board and cello sheets. Alongside these are large and small three-dimensional modernist works in an equally dizzying range of media: bronze, wood, terracotta; assemblages made from mundane, quotidian objects – bottles, vessels, blades, sickles – collected from the by-lanes of Hyderabad, and its famed Jumeraat Bazaar. These quirky, random finds are then transformed into humanized objects that cheekily play in the interstices between figuration and abstraction. Often made in pairs of angular males and bulbous females, these works of bricolage brim with sexual freedom and erotic charge. “When I am stuck with one work or project, I take up a new medium. The process keeps changing, the objects evolve accordingly”.

“Anyone can be an artist”, says DLN, but not everyone can be the kind of artist that he himself has been. Born into a farmer’s family in Nerada in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, he joined the only art school in the city of Hyderabad – despite the apprehensions of his immediate family – and completed his training at MSU Baroda. Since then, his gaze on Hyderabad, its inhabitants, its art circuits, its sexual mores and politics has been as one of an alert, observant and insouciant outsider – cool and distant, unerring and consistent. His works are marked by a confident draughtsmanship, and by an easy, enviable competence with color, technique and process. Unconcerned with institutional norms, unperturbed by market and peer expectations, DLN’s works turn away from the urban dictums and middle-class truisms that surround him. It is this sardonic, up-close, distant, insider- outsider perspective that has informed and defined much of his artistic output.

“I am an artist from the 70’s who almost always goes “untitled”. Feel free to interpret this oeuvre”, reads DLN’s Instagram account. Wilfully reclusive, DLN did not seek the limelight. In turn, the lights of the artist world also flickered on him accordingly
– sometimes glaringly, at other times haltingly, grudgingly, always unevenly. While the artist himself was unassuming and reticent, his art on the other hand was fierce, and uncompromising. Homes, interiors, landscapes, solitary human figures, tense human relationships, overt sexual obsessions recur in his works, but it is the sensuous, sexualized figures of woman, and the associated, assorted sexual acts that eventually become their dominant leitmotifs – especially in the works chosen for this show. There is freedom, fury, fearlessness and aesthetic confidence in the often savage ways in which DLN fused material and content as he translated private obsessions into complex spaces of erotic fantasies. The works depict bodies – salacious, unleashed and unfettered – in multi-faceted density and detail. And yet, what is disquieting about them is a complete lack of pressure to assert or claim, to conform or perform. Indifferent to the viewer, uninterested in critical commentary and contemporary disposition, the works in the show, like many of the self-absorbed protagonists in them, are intensely inward, complicated and dramatic beings that startle us out of deadened habits of looking and being.