Important Notice

"I want my work to be ambiguous. I would like it to appear to me every morning as a new configuration. Also I want to straddle the visible and the abstract with their forms now becoming recognisable, now going into hiding."- K G Subramanyan

K G Subramanyan, who passed away in June 2016, was one of India's leading modern artists, creating a rich and deeply engaging body of work, which began in the post-Independence space of... "I want my work to be ambiguous. I would like it to appear to me every morning as a new configuration. Also I want to straddle the visible and the abstract with their forms now becoming recognisable, now going into hiding."- K G Subramanyan

K G Subramanyan, who passed away in June 2016, was one of India's leading modern artists, creating a rich and deeply engaging body of work, which began in the post-Independence space of Indian art. As a teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, he had an abiding influence on generations of Indian artists. Throughout his prolific career, he experimented with a diverse array of mediums and practices, including paper, gouache and oils, wood, terracotta and textiles.

Subramanyan studied art at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, won a fellowship at the Slade School of Art at the University of London, and spent a decade teaching in Baroda. The present lot is a rare work from the early 1960s, when Subramanyan painted still lifes. His work, till then mainly figurative, took a turn towards cubism around this time. Subramanyan had begun working on still lifes after spending two years as the Deputy Director of Design (1959 - 1960) at the All India Handloom Board in Bombay. His time there had opened up several avenues for exploring arts and crafts, which also translated on to the canvas. The present lot reflects his interest in cubist abstraction, which was being explored by several Indian artists during this period. The painting appears to be "almost entirely surface, texture-rich tapestries woven from painterly scrawls, strokes and spots... But all this does not reduce them to non-representational visual poetry: the visual and physical proximity of the motifs...suggest the possibility of touch and the convergence of the optical and the tactile...In these representations...the drawing both clarifies and breaks down forms, or alternately, the forms stand out and merge into constellations, obliquely giving rise to other composite images." (R Siva Kumar, K.G. Subramanyan: A Retrospective, New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003, pp. 31-32)

Subramanyan aimed for ambiguity in his works, as seen in the present lot. There is a quality of animation about the abstract forms that transcends a mere compositional interest. "Gestural animation was also at the heart of Subramanyan's paintings from the mid-sixties. In the works done during 1964-65 he moved from the limited and proximate space of the table to the still intimate but larger space of the studio and the domestic interior...In these he also made his first cautious move from the graphic to the painterly, from contours defined by lines to contours marked by the variegated edge of colours, usually bright and sometimes dripping; images losing definition but gaining in suggestive ambivalence." (Kumar, p. 37)

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