Important Notice

Pastoral, one of K. G. Subramanyan's more recent works, comes eleven years after a major retrospective of his works at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. It is a result of decades of refinement of a technique that he began experimenting with in the 1940s, assisting Benode Behari Mukherjee at Kala Bhavan, the fine arts faculty of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Subramanyan's familiarity with artisan and folk traditions, and his experience... Pastoral, one of K. G. Subramanyan's more recent works, comes eleven years after a major retrospective of his works at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. It is a result of decades of refinement of a technique that he began experimenting with in the 1940s, assisting Benode Behari Mukherjee at Kala Bhavan, the fine arts faculty of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Subramanyan's familiarity with artisan and folk traditions, and his experience working with professional craftspeople at the Handloom Board helped him devise an effective method of painting his murals. Most of his later murals derive from his process of working on the ambitious Rabindralaya mural at the Ravindralaya theatre in Lucknow in 1962, made to mark the centenary of Rabindranath Tagore- eighty-one feet long and nine feet high. Constantly distilling this process over decades, later exploring and combining his 'grid' paintings, Subramanyan's monumental works seen in recent years are a sifting of narrative style and technique.

Pastoral is a triptych of discontinuous narratives populated by a myriad of references. Subramanyan's palette is dominated by a green typical of Indian foliage, and 'read' in conjunction with the title, suggests scenes from rural India. Gayatri Sinha observes how recent murals similarly made read like news columns, with scenes advancing and receding like newspaper headlines. This effect has its origins in his work of the 1970s when grids would feature, giving an impression that the viewer is watching a scene unfolding in front of him, almost clandestinely. The lines between indoor and outdoor are blurred; the esraj, a popular string instrument found in north, east and central India, and the guitar-one traditional, one derived from the west, could be scenes unfolding in different locations, bound together by time. Scenes of birds, of domestic animals, of people in various settings, allow the viewer to regard a complex array of scenes all bundled into one large mural. R. Siva Kumar notes this in Subramanyan's mid-eighties works: "Many of the paintings he did???revolved around this exchange between what was in the mind and what was outside in the world???.Subramanyan's recent paintings are like numerous windows opening onto a polyscenic world, negating the notion of one objective world and the universal reading it postulates." (K. G. Subramanyan: A Retrospective, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2003, pgs.59,81)

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