Om Prakash Sharma

After graduating from Delhi Polytechnic in 1958, Om Prakash Sharma began his career as an art educator at the D.A.V. School in Delhi. During this time, galleries across India and the U.S. exhibited solo shows of the young artist, bringing him increasing success and recognition. In 1964, Sharma received a Fulbright Scholarship for postgraduate studies in Art History and Fine Art at Columbia University and the Art Students League of New York. Here, he befriended many important American artists such as Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Phillip Guston, and the famed Color Field painter Mark Rothko. Rothko admired Sharma and the visual idiom he was developing in New York: "He looked at my paintings and said that he dug my freedom of doing what I wanted, while he was confined to work within his own formulations." (Om Prakash Sharma, 'Explorer', Om Prakash, 2017, http://opalart.org/journey/)

Inspired by Rothko and his distillation of shape and color, Sharma created a purely abstract visual language that transcended the limitations of realism. Sharma felt a deep commitment to the conceptual nature of art: "To create sublime art, one must live in the abstract." (ibid.) He wholly embraced abstraction while synthesizing Indian visual idioms. In 1985, the American painter and curator Lee Mullican featured Sharma's work in a Neo-Tantra exhibition at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Untitled is a master example of the artist articulating the spiritual through abstraction. With profound depth, the geometric, almost sculptural horizon is capped with a simple yellow square. The sharp lines of the composition’s lower section contrast the shaded orb that floats above, which possesses the ascendant quality of a sun or moon. The present work boldly captures Sharma's appreciation of and devotion to the abstract form.