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"In my scheme of things, abstraction and reality are not antagonistic entities. So I find whatever I see entrancing - faces, figures, landscapes, object groups... Mixing the normal with the hieratic, the worldly with the unworldly. Or fact with fantasy." - K G SUBRAMANYAN

A versatile artist and prolific scholar, K G Subramanyan's paintings are informed by his in-depth knowledge of diverse artistic traditions. The resulting... "In my scheme of things, abstraction and reality are not antagonistic entities. So I find whatever I see entrancing - faces, figures, landscapes, object groups... Mixing the normal with the hieratic, the worldly with the unworldly. Or fact with fantasy." - K G SUBRAMANYAN

A versatile artist and prolific scholar, K G Subramanyan's paintings are informed by his in-depth knowledge of diverse artistic traditions. The resulting creations are universal even though they draw heavily from - and even disrupt - the mythology and folk arts and crafts of India. Particularly from the 1980s onwards, the artist increasingly incorporated elements from a popular bazaar tradition of glass painting. "He calls them his bazaar or his Kalighat altarpieces. He does it with an element of the conscious sardonic ironic sense of a modern artist who wants to appropriate these things and reinvent them within the space of his own art - give them an entirely new life... I don't think that element of parody, wit, satire is present in any other modern artist at that level. Subramanyan seems to almost take it by its tail and push it in a wholly different direction. And the rupture here is amazing: from the tubular bodies, limbs, spaces of those diptychs, interiors to the kind of raucous animals, nudes and the subversive qualities of the imagery, where he is taking folk forms and almost ripping them open, bringing right to the fore its erotic form." (Tapati Guha-Thakurta, "K G Subramanyan and Contemporary Indian Art," seagullindia.com, online)

The present lot comprises four panels in a grid-like composition - a style that would inform Subramanyan's later work, reminiscent of tapestries or murals with their interconnected storylines. It portrays a variety of human emotions and interactions in a non-linear narrative, rendered primarily in shades of blue interspersed with contrasting colours. According to R Siva Kumar, the creation of these grids "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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