Important Notice

Ram Kumar, like many of his confreres among the first generation of post-colonial Indian artists, combined an internationalist desire with the need to belong emphatically to their homeland. In its internationalist mood, this generation looked to the early 20th-century modernisms of Paris, London and Vienna for inspiration; its need to belong prompted an interest in the construction of a viable 'Indian' aesthetic that bore a dynamic relationship... Ram Kumar, like many of his confreres among the first generation of post-colonial Indian artists, combined an internationalist desire with the need to belong emphatically to their homeland. In its internationalist mood, this generation looked to the early 20th-century modernisms of Paris, London and Vienna for inspiration; its need to belong prompted an interest in the construction of a viable 'Indian' aesthetic that bore a dynamic relationship to an Indian identity. With Ram Kumar, this quest for an indigenist tenor has not meant a superficial inventory of 'native' motifs offered as evidence of a static and essentialist Indian identity. Instead he demonstrates that a painter can enact the innermost dramas of his culture while maintaining the individuality, even idiosyncrasy of his performance.

Initially expressing himself through a figurative idiom and then largely architectonic one, Ram Kumar only turned to complete abstraction in the late 1960s. Over the last five decades, these abstract works have represented the artist's journey towards what he terms the authentic language of painting'. Although they are of human and architectural forms, paintings like this are firmly rooted in Kumar's experiences of nature, particularly those of his youth in the foothills of the Himalayas.

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