Important Notice

K G Subramanyan was a versatile artist who explored painting, sculpture, and printmaking, and was also a writer and illustrator of children's books. He experimented with various styles, such as terracotta murals and the reverse glass and acrylic paintings he was best known for. The present lot, a reverse painting created using oil and gouache on an acrylic sheet, belongs to a period when the artist was creating similarly vibrant works employing... K G Subramanyan was a versatile artist who explored painting, sculpture, and printmaking, and was also a writer and illustrator of children's books. He experimented with various styles, such as terracotta murals and the reverse glass and acrylic paintings he was best known for. The present lot, a reverse painting created using oil and gouache on an acrylic sheet, belongs to a period when the artist was creating similarly vibrant works employing a combination of such media. The grid-like composition seen here also came to inform his painting style in later years, where a scene was constructed as a seemingly non-linear narrative, contained within vertical panels, reminiscent of tapestries or murals with interconnected storylines.

According to R Siva Kumar, the creation of these grids or panels "fragments the picture, and turns it into a compressed surface. A frame within a frame, it breaks the picture into several details, serves as a geometric counterpoint to the organic contours of objects, and keeps the images suspended between a whole and a collage of parts... narration lends them other levels of complexity and meaning. But based on gesture, [Subramanyan's] narratives are articulated like theatre or a spectacle, not as a unified scene or linear story." (K. G. Subramanyan: A Retrospective, New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003, pp. 48-49, 78)

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