Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

90 THE PASSIONATE DETACHMENT 49 LAXMA GOUD (b.1940) Untitled S/d in Telugu, l.c. Mixed Media on Glass, 1991 40 x 60 cm. (15.7 x 23.6”) Rs. 250,000 - 300,000 $ 5,320 - 6,385 Ratnotama Sengupta : “ The predominant mood of your work is erotic. There is a sensuality, a sexuality, an overt eroticism which few have attempted in the contemporary idiom with your finesse…” Laxma Goud : “ The element you have described is the root — the primordial relationship which is capable of enveloping a number of issues and also capable of throwing open problems related to human kind. A number of problems have their origin in the oppressed pattern of life. People would like to speak but are repressed to do so. My work struggles towards liberating it. Not the act itself but the whole concept, the emotion…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… I make sexuality more obvious than it is, but we all think alike. The subconscious becomes stated in my work while most of us would hold ourselves back.” (From conversation between Laxma Goud & Ratnottama Sengupta, New Delhi, 1994). Colour illustration of this painting is reproduced in The Flamed-Mosaic , HEART/Mapin 1997, Fig 217, p265.