Om Prakash Sharma

Acquired in India, circa early 2000s

Private Collection, Geneseo, New York

Thence by descent

After graduating from Delhi Polytechnic in 1958, Om Prakash Sharma commenced his artistic career at the D.A.V. School in Delhi as an art educator. During that time, Sharma held solo exhibitions across India and the US and in 1964, he received a Fulbright Scholarship for postgraduate studies in Art History and Fine Art at Columbia University and the Art Students League of New York. Whilst in New York, he befriended several significant American artists including 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 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.) 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.

Stars beautifully displays Sharma’s abstract idiom, articulating the spiritual through his symbolism. Consisting of a trio of cartouche-like cylinders, the composition is replete with contrasts of soft and sharp, dark and light. The lines of the oval shapes meld with triangular forms, and an ethereal cerulean blue glows behind, creating a radiant, transcendent quality.