Important Notice

Through his artistic career, Ram Kumar has explored and addressed questions of introspection, spirituality and the divine. Beginning with figurative works often populated by haunting characters, he gradually progressed into abstraction. He moved first from people to urban landscapes - the spaces that these people inhabit - and finally to landscapes devoid of any definite, recognizable structures or objects. It has often been posited that the... Through his artistic career, Ram Kumar has explored and addressed questions of introspection, spirituality and the divine. Beginning with figurative works often populated by haunting characters, he gradually progressed into abstraction. He moved first from people to urban landscapes - the spaces that these people inhabit - and finally to landscapes devoid of any definite, recognizable structures or objects. It has often been posited that the landscapes he paints are not necessarily 'real' but are 'inner landscapes' rooted in actual spaces but are, ultimately, amalgamations of the artist's experiences and places he has visited, and the questions he seeks to address.

This progression has often been linked to a shift from a focus on the exterior, from people and their places to the interior and a return to nature. "Nature at this later stage of Ram Kumar's life, came both as a release from his past and a return to it ... If Ram Kumar's abstractions still have a strange power to move us, it is because they are not built on denial or negation; they carry with them all the stains and bruises of the preceding periods, their sense of grief and solitude, but now they have been somehow transcended" (Nirmal Verma, "From Solitude to Salvation", Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2006, pgs. 25-26).

This work was made in 1986 during Kumar's transition from urban to natural landscapes. Devoid of any recognizable markers, the use of colour and line hint at formations - hills, mountains and rivers - and yet one cannot be certain of what one is viewing: a predicament that lends to the sense of solitude Verma refers to. Throughout his career, the use of colour has been an integral aspect of Kumar's work and it is at this time that one sees a progression in palette. The sombre greyish tones, the swathes of white and flashes of blue all seen in this work are characteristic of this time and this shift.

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