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Lot Essay
Ram Kumar's landscapes often straddle the boundary between abstraction and naturalism, quoting both but succumbing to neither. In the early 1960s, the artist abandoned figuration after a pivotal journey to Varanasi. Since then, the landscape remained his focus for the rest of his artistic career, though his images and interpretations of it have undergone several changes.
In his works from the 1980s like the present lot, it is the movement in the canvas that captures the viewer, "[...] as if all that was arrested and frozen until now, has been 'touched' by some unknown god who by releasing its bonds makes it free and lets it flow in its own momentum." (N. Verma, 'From Solitude to Salvation', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 26) There is a move from larger, relatively flat expanses of color to a more fractured pictorial surface where the image is created from shorter, jagged strokes with a palette knife.
In this expansive landscape, brilliant blues emerge from what seems to be a dense fog of aqua, grey and tawny yellow and brown. Kumar’s prime motifs are informed by the numerous Indian landscapes he experienced, from the river banks of the holy town of Varanasi to the impregnable mountains of Ladakh. This painting is an expression of the artist's dramatic exaltation of these vistas that inspired him for much of his life.
"His 'abstractions' are not flights into the 'unknown', but like a shifting beam of light they move, passing through the entire space of the painting, from one segment of reality to another, uncovering the hidden relations, between the sky, the rock, the river. The sacred resides not in the objects depicted, but in the relations discovered." (N. Verma, 'From Solitude to Salvation', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 27)
In his works from the 1980s like the present lot, it is the movement in the canvas that captures the viewer, "[...] as if all that was arrested and frozen until now, has been 'touched' by some unknown god who by releasing its bonds makes it free and lets it flow in its own momentum." (N. Verma, 'From Solitude to Salvation', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 26) There is a move from larger, relatively flat expanses of color to a more fractured pictorial surface where the image is created from shorter, jagged strokes with a palette knife.
In this expansive landscape, brilliant blues emerge from what seems to be a dense fog of aqua, grey and tawny yellow and brown. Kumar’s prime motifs are informed by the numerous Indian landscapes he experienced, from the river banks of the holy town of Varanasi to the impregnable mountains of Ladakh. This painting is an expression of the artist's dramatic exaltation of these vistas that inspired him for much of his life.
"His 'abstractions' are not flights into the 'unknown', but like a shifting beam of light they move, passing through the entire space of the painting, from one segment of reality to another, uncovering the hidden relations, between the sky, the rock, the river. The sacred resides not in the objects depicted, but in the relations discovered." (N. Verma, 'From Solitude to Salvation', Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 27)