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Lot 34

 

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Ram Kumar has progressed through several artistic phases over his career taking him from the figurative to the abstract. Although his world view has not altered, his imagery has undergone a process of gradual clarification and refinement. As an art student in Paris, and in the company of the capital’s leftist intellectual circles, Kumar’s early paintings are of the lost souls of the modern industrialised cities. However, from playing an... Ram Kumar has progressed through several artistic phases over his career taking him from the figurative to the abstract. Although his world view has not altered, his imagery has undergone a process of gradual clarification and refinement. As an art student in Paris, and in the company of the capital’s leftist intellectual circles, Kumar’s early paintings are of the lost souls of the modern industrialised cities. However, from playing an important role in the drama of his paintings in the 1950s, the figure was to be completely eliminated in his works of the following decade. In Kumar’s works of the 1960s it was to be man’s constructions rather than the human form that was to be the anchorage for the grievances of the ‘self’. Initially, he turned his focus to the city of Varanasi and its patchwork of riverbank buildings. As the ‘eternal city’ of death and rebirth Kumar found in Varanasi a new expression of human suffering in the intersection of faith and torment. In painting the city, Kumar could both liberate reality from its human context while also maintaining a connection to the divine. His canvases of this period, often referred to as ‘The Banaras Years’, did not ring of an absence of the human figure, rather the power in the works derived from the cityscape as a central metaphor for cultural and psychological fragmentation. Gradually, the architecture diminished from his canvases as he painted with an increased ascetic purity. His artistic metamorphosis of the 1970s, the period from which the present lot is painted, saw him renouncing not only the human body but also its dwellings, to embrace nature itself.

The present lot, painted in 1975, is a striking example of Kumar’s artistic journey. The painting, with its fractured colour planes and multiple perspectives, is indicative of his career progression into deconstructive abstraction. In this work, Kumar uses an earthy palette to suggest landforms, bodies of water, sky and hills. He applies the paint in purposeful delicate strokes, his wedges of colour and outlines diverging and converging in a consummate composition of nature’s forces and forms.

Although abstract, Kumar’s paintings do not suffer from being dryly symbolistic, sensationalist or merely decorative, traits that sometimes plague Western abstract art. Rather, they resonate with a quiet contemplative spirituality grounded in the visible realities of the world, the relations that lie between the hills, the sky, the water.

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