Important Notice

A trip to Banaras in the 1960s marked a pivotal shift in Ram Kumar’s artistic vocabulary – he began to paint landscapes with fervour, leaving figurative forms behind. Kumar’s landscapes captured the true essence of place without the use of overt symbolism, invoking emotions through the strategic and meticulous use of colour. With regard to his palette, Kumar states - "There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a colour applied on... A trip to Banaras in the 1960s marked a pivotal shift in Ram Kumar’s artistic vocabulary – he began to paint landscapes with fervour, leaving figurative forms behind. Kumar’s landscapes captured the true essence of place without the use of overt symbolism, invoking emotions through the strategic and meticulous use of colour. With regard to his palette, Kumar states - "There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a colour applied on canvas. It stands out by itself in the beginning but slowly it starts building up relationships with other areas, other colours, and forms. This continues. There is a pause, a silence, an accident and in the end some sort of harmony." (Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 202)

The present lot is an amalgamation of earth tones along with cool hues, mimicking planes and terrain, creating movement. To Kumar, capturing the essence of the place took precedence over realistic rendering. This transition imbibes a sense of ambiguity in the present lot, seeing that it could be one of the many places Kumar travelled to. However, it invokes a sense of familiarity, as though the landscapes Kumar presents are vistas that one has encountered before. "Whenever I see a Ram Kumar painting, and a landscape, I get the feeling that I’ve been there before. The manner in which memory functions through deliberate recall and association. The very forms of composition suggest that. The hard and soft, the tangible and the elusive, the structure and sensation. The structure of what lies before the eyes and the sensation of what lies behind. This is the link between the painter’s self and our own." (Gill, p. 124)

"All the places I visited impacted my work, whether it was Greece or Ladakh, Paris, Venice, Prague or Baghdad."- RAM KUMAR

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