Important Notice

"When one is young and beginning, one's work is dominated by content, by ideas - but as one grows older, one turns to the language of painting itself. I have grown detached - I want to find the same peace that the mystics found" (as quoted in "Landscapes of the Mind", Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 117).

Over the last five decades, Ram Kumar's abstract works have represented the artist's journey... "When one is young and beginning, one's work is dominated by content, by ideas - but as one grows older, one turns to the language of painting itself. I have grown detached - I want to find the same peace that the mystics found" (as quoted in "Landscapes of the Mind", Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 117).

Over the last five decades, Ram Kumar's abstract works have represented the artist's journey towards what he terms the 'language of painting'. Although they are drained of human and architectural forms, painting like the present lot are firmly rooted in Kumar's experiences of nature, particularly those of his youth in the foothills of the Himalayas. "Ram Kumar does not simply replicate the visible; we respond to his meditative frames precisely because they have moved from the perceptual to the conceptual, from semblance to structure. He does not mirror reality, but subjects it to prismatic analysis: his topography, for instance, is a diagram of forces in a field rather than a picturesque post-card view; each city, each trapfall is a summation of views from various angles, arranged on the same plan for the discernment of the viewer. Ram Kumar translates the landscape, often, into a surveyor's table of notations, of contour lines, benchmarks and pressure graphs" (Ranjit Hoskote, "The Poet of the Visionary Landscape", Ibid., p. 38).

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