A solo exhibition of veteran artist Ram Kumar’s works

Paintings by Ram Kumar were recently on display at LKA, New Delhi, courtesy Vadehra Art Gallery. Following is the gallery note on the veteran artist:

The human condition is the main concern of the painter manifested in his early works by the alienated individual within the city, from the city as well as from himself.
With a cool palette of aquas, blues, grays, and tawny yellows, his prime motifs oscillate between the numerous visitations to he made to Banaras and the open vistas that are in essence painterly vestiges of his life’s journey.

Ram Kumar shared with his other contemporaries, in Delhi Shilpi Chakra and Bombay Progressive Group in 1950s. He left for Paris in and studied painting under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger. In the transitory period, the lines gave way to sweeping strokes of blue and golden yellow lending buoyancy to the painting. In the early 1960s Ram Kumar took to abstract painting after a pivotal journey to Banaras and never returned to figural painting since then.

By banishing the figure he was able to emphasize the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors. His ‘abstractions’ are not flights into the ‘unknown’ but like shifting beams 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.

In the eighties with his broken structures, Ram Kumar made a reference to an incipient violence and destruction. In the later part of his career, a residual geography and a notational architecture crept into his landscapes. He translates the landscape in to a system of line, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic, entering into dialogue with texture and tone, governs the distribution of significant masses over the picture space.

His landscapes often straddle the boundaries between abstraction and naturalism, quoting both but succumbing to neither. The recent ones are not representations of specific sights, but rather a complex hybrid of memories merged with actual sights visited over the years.