Important Notice

"By the 60s [Subramanyan] was an exemplar of linguistic discipline and of the artistic versatility that an art-craft interface can lead to. [He] became an artist with great expressive reach and range. His enlarged repertoire included paintings structured with the communicative efficacy of language and design; printed and painted textiles and woven sculptures with the aesthetic subtlety and expressive economy of art; toys designed with wit and... "By the 60s [Subramanyan] was an exemplar of linguistic discipline and of the artistic versatility that an art-craft interface can lead to. [He] became an artist with great expressive reach and range. His enlarged repertoire included paintings structured with the communicative efficacy of language and design; printed and painted textiles and woven sculptures with the aesthetic subtlety and expressive economy of art; toys designed with wit and expressivity; illuminated books in which text and image led one to the other; and murals in which details and the aggregate played hide-and-seek of image and meaning.

From the 70s Subramanyan demonstrated - through his re-articulation of the age-old techniques of terracotta and his retake on the popular genre of glass painting - how an artist can tap older practices to add to the semantic resonances of one's work. While most modernists chose to conform to a personal style and brought their individuality into sharp focus - but narrowed their range of skills and activities - Subramanyan preferred to develop a personal language and use its syntactic plasticity to enlarge his communicative reach. And it was a strategy that paid off richly.

Subramanyan's late works were provoking and celebratory, teasing and subversive, humane and irreverent at once. Done with scintillating spontaneity, they were not merely expressive and complex like most things he had done in the past but were also some of his most vibrant paintings. This came partly from his deep engagement with the world and partly from the way he moved from one level of communication, or expression, to another through calculated inflections of his visual idiom. And the ease with which he did this - whether it was the little drawings, or the more thought-out paintings and expansive murals orchestrated to come alive at many levels - was truly phenomenal."

- R Siva Kumar

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