Important Notice

The transformation in the content and technique of Ram Kumar’s painting follows a steady artistic and ideological trajectory. His interest in the human predicament through the 1950’s in post-independence India gave way to the absence of individual identity during the first half of the 1960’s following his Varanasi visit with M.F. Husain.

After 1965, we see Ram Kumar’s perspective change as he “took a rather expansive view of nature, a... The transformation in the content and technique of Ram Kumar’s painting follows a steady artistic and ideological trajectory. His interest in the human predicament through the 1950’s in post-independence India gave way to the absence of individual identity during the first half of the 1960’s following his Varanasi visit with M.F. Husain.

After 1965, we see Ram Kumar’s perspective change as he “took a rather expansive view of nature, a kind of bird’s–eye view… He saw everything as an emanation of nature. But while he chose to release or reassemble the angular, mysterious forms, he also chose the multiple perspectives he had learnt to master…”(Richard Bartholomew, The Abstract as a pictorial proposition, Ram Kumar, A Journey Within, Vadhera Art Gallery, 1996, p. 30)

“It seems that the painter is looking at landscape in a number of ways and from different angles and points of view. Many of the forms in these recent paintings refer to and resemble the forms in the violently facetted and fragmented background of the paintings of the mid-1950s” (Ibid, p. 31). Ram Kumar carries the thread of his work – the interrelationships of form, space and movement through to his abstracted landscapes – he provides the viewer with a universality that transcends known geographies and creates a sense of timelessness. His work reflects his concerns as an artist documenting both, the importance of, and the dissolution of the individual human identity and a corresponding territoriality in a post-independence, developing India.

“Sometimes glimpses of some unusual forms, movement of depths, rhythmic lines come to my mind. …It was a lifelong effort to find some harmony between a rich, throbbing, ‘spiritually-visited’ nature and the secret, fleeting thoughts of an artist…” (From Ram Kumar’s Notebooks, Ram Kumar, A Journey Within, Vadhera Art Gallery, 1996, p. 204)

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