Untitled

Moving seamlessly between abstraction and figuration, Ram Kumar's body of work addresses the conventions of Western Modernism while preserving a strong sense of his post-independence Indian identity. Kumar, confronting the important Hindu city of Benares in a series of paintings done during the 1960's, moved from these famously taut and faceted landscapes to a more fluid style in the following decades. The subsequent works maintain Kumar's rapturous energy and dynamism but do so with a looser more expressive brushstroke. Kumar's later abstractions reveal a foundation not in the crowded architecture of urbanity characteristic of the Benares series but in the undulating hills of the countryside. Ram Kumar's landscapes of the are endowed with a spatial quality that is achieved through the artist's deft use of multiple perspectives and broad, flat planes of color. Although these landscapes are not realistic representations of elements from nature, "wedges of land and expanses of water; demarcations of land as arid and fertile; febrile rock and luxuriant vegetation; sunlight and shade; moisture and mist" are all communicated through his use of color. (R. Bartholomew, 'The Abstract Principle in the Paintings of Ram Kumar', Lalit Kala Contemporary 19 & 20, New Delhi, April - September 1975, p. 14.) The palette used for these works ranges from brown to ochre to yellow, and the overall composition is realized through subtle tonal variations that infuse the canvas with a sense of movement and energy.