Threshold Art Gallery Presents Abandoned, A Solo Exhibition By Latika Katt

Poster credit: Threshold Art Gallery

Latika Katt (1948 – 2025) is among the most formidable figures in Indian sculpture – an artist who took up the most physical of the arts and refused every limit placed on it, including those placed on her. She cast her own bronze, carved her own stone, and bridled at the phrase woman sculptor.

At the center of the exhibition is a group of sculptures from the Abandoned series, among the last works Latika made. Each begins as a bronze, cast from waxes modelled by the artist, then mounted within larger stones, as a gem might be set into a gold or silver mount, or a relic into its reliquary. Two different materials fuse together into a new, sympathetic configuration, settling into an unexpected accord. What emerges resembles an archaeological find, a surgical implant or a fragment of forgotten architecture: something built, buried and recovered. Completed at the very end of her life, the work’s title carries its full weight.

Latika’s love for drawing was as deep as her passion for carving. It was a medium through which she ideated, throughout her rather frenetic life. She rarely drew panoramic views, but rather her focus lay in capturing details: of sunlight glistening on water, rippled sand, or the texture of twisted vines of a tree. While sculpting was hard work, often made in the presence of a crew of helpers, drawings were made in the solace of a closed studio, akin to the wax maquettes that she toyed with whenever her fingers were restless. These were the first impressions of her ideas and therefore extremely important in the overall process of how she worked throughout her life.

She trained at Banaras Hindu University and MSU Baroda, won a research scholarship from the Slade School of Art, London in 1981 and received many honours, among them the National Award of the Lalit Kala Akademi (1980) and the Fourth Beijing International Art Biennale award (2010). Her work was shown at major institutions and biennales in India and abroad, including the Paris Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art, Paris; Stree in Moscow, Leningrad and Tashkent, Chicago, the Osaka Triennale, and Bahrain, as well as the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, and the Cymroza and Sakshi galleries, Mumbai.