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Lot 88

 

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The 1960s were an important transitional period in Ram Kumar’s oeuvre. Over the course of this decade, the artist’s painting first dispensed with figuration, and then with all residual signs of human habitation and presence, to embrace a pure abstraction of land, sea and sky. Exorcising man and all the manmade from his practice, over the course of this decade, the artist “…addressed himself to the formal aberrations of mismatched planes, jamming... The 1960s were an important transitional period in Ram Kumar’s oeuvre. Over the course of this decade, the artist’s painting first dispensed with figuration, and then with all residual signs of human habitation and presence, to embrace a pure abstraction of land, sea and sky. Exorcising man and all the manmade from his practice, over the course of this decade, the artist “…addressed himself to the formal aberrations of mismatched planes, jamming the horizontal perspective against top views inspired by site-mapping and aerial photography, and locking the muddy impasto-built riverbank constructions into a Cubist geometrical analysis. Gradually, the architecture drained away from his canvases: society itself passed from his concerns.” By the late 1960s, his landscapes, although they retained the austerity of his figurative works from the previous decade, became concentrated into “abstractionist hymns to nature”, composed of intersecting shards of muted colours (Ranjit Hoskote, “Parts of a World: Reflections on the Art of Ram Kumar”, Ram Kumar Recent Works, Saffronart and Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, p. 6).

In the works from this period, including the present lot, “…the landscape became its own architecture. Ram Kumar began to commemorate vast, epic images…The paintings of this third and continuing phase, elaborated in Ram Kumar’s hallmark palette of ochre, ultramarine, sienna and viridian, carry a sharp whiff of pine from the Shivaliks, the Himalayan foothills. We sense, in them, the aura of Shimla, where the artist spent his childhood, and of Andretta, the village in the Kangra valley to which he retreats periodically, to replenish himself” (Ibid.).

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