Ram Kumar
(1924 - 2018)
Untitled
Ram Kumar has honed his visual repertoire and painted landscapes which evoke the intangible, over a remarkable career spanning seven decades. His austere colour palette and careful brushstrokes reveal an ability to beckon moods through abstract representation, as seen in the present lot. Limiting his palette to shades of tans, ochre, red, and blue, he treats the abstracted landscape with elegiac restraint. "The variegated colours of these...
Ram Kumar has honed his visual repertoire and painted landscapes which evoke the intangible, over a remarkable career spanning seven decades. His austere colour palette and careful brushstrokes reveal an ability to beckon moods through abstract representation, as seen in the present lot. Limiting his palette to shades of tans, ochre, red, and blue, he treats the abstracted landscape with elegiac restraint. "The variegated colours of these irregular planes are suggestive of tracts of sea and sand, of rocky mountains and flat fields, of barren, parched earth and fecund vegetation. It is left to colour and textures to transmit the moods and sensations that the various topographical elements convey. Perhaps they even represent the more unseen but perceived elements in the phenomenal world-the warm sunshine, a cooling breeze, the dampness of mists or hot, gusty winds. Ochres, rusts, yellows, greens, mauves and ultramarine blues are orchestrated together to produce complex colour symphonies, which induce alternate feelings of both movement and stillness." (Meera Menezes, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2017, p. 13) Writing for Lalit Kala Contemporary in 1975-76, the same period when the present lot was painted, art critic Richard Bartholomew eloquently summed up the evolution in Kumar's vision: "...there is a spatial quality in the recent painting (1970 onwards), a sense of flight, of movement, and there is an aerial perspective (sometimes a series of perspectives), and it seems that the painter is looking at landscape in a number of ways and from different angles and points of view... Everything from the past is there... It has been a long journey through nature and life to be able to see things in this way and from this perspective." (quoted in Rati Bartholomew, Pablo Bartholomew, Carmen Kagal and Rosalyn D'Mello eds., Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic, New Delhi: BART, 2012, pp. 539-540, 544) In the decades that followed, Kumar phased out any vestige of the figurative, using colour and planes that had no obvious basis in either architecture or the physical landscape. The present lot is part of an important phase when Kumar straddled the worlds of the outer, physical and inner landscapes of memory and mood."There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a colour applied on canvas" - RAM KUMAR
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Lot
60
of
81
EVENING SALE | NEW DELHI, LIVE
21 SEPTEMBER 2017
Estimate
Rs 60,00,000 - 80,00,000
$95,240 - 126,985
Import duty applicable
Why?
ARTWORK DETAILS
Ram Kumar
Untitled
Signed and dated 'Ram Kumar 76' (on the reverse)
1976
Oil on canvas
50 x 32.5 in (127 x 82.6 cm)
PROVENANCE: Acquired from Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 1976 Property from the Dirk and Hixe Angelroth Collection, Austria
Category: Painting
Style: Abstract
ARTWORK SIZE:
Height of Figure: 6'