Important Notice

Ram Kumar’s works from the mid and late 1960s represent the earliest phase of his deconstructionist abstraction. Turning away from his focus on the city of Varanasi and its teetering riverbank architecture, the artist began painting the landscape in its most pristine form, unrecognizable in terms of geography or location. In these canvases with their fractured planes and multiple perspectives, Kumar moves beyond the human figure and its... Ram Kumar’s works from the mid and late 1960s represent the earliest phase of his deconstructionist abstraction. Turning away from his focus on the city of Varanasi and its teetering riverbank architecture, the artist began painting the landscape in its most pristine form, unrecognizable in terms of geography or location. In these canvases with their fractured planes and multiple perspectives, Kumar moves beyond the human figure and its habitations to express as simply as possible the wildness and solitude of the natural environs he encountered in his youth in the foothills of the Himalayas and his later travels around the country.

“By banishing the figure from his kingdom of shadows, the artist was able to emphasise the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation, the bondage of an imposed destiny that strangled the will to liberation and self-knowledge” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Parts of a World: Reflections on the Art of Ram Kumar”, Ram Kumar Recent Works, Saffronart and Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, p. 6). The artist elaborates, saying, “… perhaps a human face or a recognizable image shuts all doors to an observer as far as the basic essence of a work of art is concerned. Only the superficial image remains on the surface which has very little to do with art. As in classical music words are insignificant. In art image is distraction” (as quoted in “From Ram Kumar’s Notebooks”, Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 201).

“Ram Kumar’s colours range between greys, yellow ochres and browns, but they derive their significance from their tonal subtleties, the tension they create in passing from one tone to another. His line again is not a boundary, its function is not merely to define form. It pulsates at every point of its length, alive like colours, alive like the spaces it creates.” (J. Swaminathan, Link, 26 Feb. 1961, qtd in Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadhera Art Gallery, 1996, p104)

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