Ram Kumar b.1924

Good overall condition. Faint impression along lower left edge, perhaps from a previous frame. Colors lighter and brighter than catalogue illustration, especially the blue accent in the center.
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Ram Kumar's visit to the holy city of Benares in the early 1960s proved to be a momentous event in his career. The eternal cycle of life, death, grief and celebration played out in the streets and riverbanks of the city left a deep impact on him causing him to reflect upon the inherent and unchanging dualities of the Universe. Shunning figuration altogether the artist turned inward deploying 'architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation.'(Ranjit Hoskote in Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 37).

Over the course of the decade Ram Kumar's paintings moved towards pure abstraction and by the end of the decade the elements of the landscape itself were reduced to barely recognizable forms juxtaposed in shifting vertical and horizontal planes. The artist developed this vocabulary over the next two decades painting majestic landscapes imbued with a grand scale as seen in the present work from the early 1980s.

These works represented a, '...decisive leap into nature itself.' (Nirmal Verma in Ram Kumar: A Retrospective, New Delhi, Feb. 1994, p. 7).The artist turned inward to the landscapes of his childhood spent at the foothills of the Himalayas. As he said, "When I sit facing the Dhauladhar range with the thick forests of the Shivaliks at my back, I start probing within myself, my mind full of memories and lost images." (Ram Kumar, rpt. in Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 27).