Important Notice

Ram Kumar has, over the course of his long artistic career, explored and addressed questions of introspection, spirituality, and the divine. Though he began with figurative works that were often populated by haunting characters, he gradually progressed into abstraction. He first moved from people to urban landscapes, i.e., the spaces these people inhabit, and then to landscapes that were devoid of any definite, recognisable structures or... Ram Kumar has, over the course of his long artistic career, explored and addressed questions of introspection, spirituality, and the divine. Though he began with figurative works that were often populated by haunting characters, he gradually progressed into abstraction. He first moved from people to urban landscapes, i.e., the spaces these people inhabit, and then to landscapes that were devoid of any definite, recognisable structures or objects.

This progression has often been linked to a shift from a focus on the exterior, from people and their places to the interior and a return to nature. "Nature at this later stage of Ram Kumar's life, came both as a release from his past and a return to it ... If Ram Kumar's abstractions still have a strange power to move us, it is because they are not built on denial or negation; they carry with them all the stains and bruises of the preceding periods, their sense of grief and solitude, but now they have been somehow transcended." (Nirmal Verma, "From Solitude to Salvation," Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, pp. 25-26)

The shift in Kumar's style of painting became more evident from the mid-1960s and early '70s onwards. There was a recalibration of perspective which led to a series of landscapes far more expansive in nature, as well as a move from a dark and muted palette that evoked an atmosphere of desolation and sullenness to one dominated by browns and umbers along with semi-representational forms.

Kumar's many travels over the decade changed his artistic vision. Soon, even architectonic elements began disappearing, replaced by a desire for pure abstraction, as seen in the present lot. "...He would look to nature for inspiration and transform his contemplation of the landscape into an irregular patchwork quilt of colour. There was no longer any attempt to portray a realistic representation of what he observed. Instead, the outer landscape would transform itself into the inner mindscape, which in turn would manifest itself on canvas and paper. The moods and sensations that were evoked in him by his meditation on the outer world would play out as colours and textures." (Meera Menezes, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, pp. 12-13)

Devoid of any recognisable markers, the use of colour and line in the present lot hints at formations - hills, mountains, and rivers - and yet it is difficult to be certain of what one is viewing, thus bringing to mind the sense of solitude mentioned by Verma. Kumar uses a palette comprising of shades of brown - both dark and light - interspersed with flashes of green and black in the present lot to highlight his transition even further.

Painted in 1980, the present lot remains a striking example of Kumar's artistic journey. The painting, with its fractured colour planes and multiple perspectives, is indicative of his career progression into deconstructive abstraction. He applies the paint in purposeful delicate strokes, his wedges of colour and outlines diverging and converging in a consummate composition of nature's forces and forms.

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