Italian artist Kratu has painted women from the mid-60s.
In the 80s, in Auroville, he shifted to stoneware sculpture, but continued to create women in all shapes and sizes, except now, influenced often by the philosophy of the Mother at the Ashram. “I’m fascinated by the movement of womens’ bodies,” says Kratu, “When I touch the ceramic, I can feel a kind of form in my mind, which shapes itself into the sculpture.”
His works sport glaze rarely, and the occasional splash of colour is from his painting days, but for the most part, they are fired in a firewood stove, lending them a dark, burnt, bronze-like touch. Among these pieces is a series titled ‘Birth of Venus’ inspired by the Greek myth that Kratu began sculpting from a few years ago. Different images of Venus’s body lie side-by-side; in the first with eyes shut, later gradually open and finally, fully open. “These represent, to me, the process of consciousness entering matter,” says Kratu.
"I expressed myself as an expressionist painter and explored painting from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties. Since then I turned to ceramic sculpture, I try to express the plasticity of faces and dynamic movement of bodies."
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