Important Notice

Painted in 2008, the present lot marks a period when recognisable elements from landscapes and cityscapes, such as trees, began to reappear in Ram Kumar’s work, following nearly three decades of planar abstraction. As critic Meera Menezes writes, “In the past two decades, representational forms have… made an appearance in Kumar’s landscapes, rupturing their abstract vistas. While some lie embedded in his colour fields and need to be slowly and... Painted in 2008, the present lot marks a period when recognisable elements from landscapes and cityscapes, such as trees, began to reappear in Ram Kumar’s work, following nearly three decades of planar abstraction. As critic Meera Menezes writes, “In the past two decades, representational forms have… made an appearance in Kumar’s landscapes, rupturing their abstract vistas. While some lie embedded in his colour fields and need to be slowly and painstakingly excavated, others, such as depictions of trees with their slender trunks and canopies of leaves, pop out.” (Meera Menezes, “Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind”, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, p. 13)
Nature remained central to Kumar’s artistic and spiritual journey. What began with his exploration of Benaras in 1960 developed into a lifelong inward search for a sense of harmony. Works such as the present lot evoke the untamed beauty and quiet solitude of the natural world, perhaps drawing on Kumar’s childhood memories of growing up amidst the Himalayan landscape in Simla, and his later travels across India. Colour becomes the central focus of the composition, governing its structure and creating an emotionally charged sensory experience. Earthy tones are interspersed with cooler hues, suggesting shifting planes and terrain built up through layers of impasto applied with a palette knife. According to Nirmal Verma, nature “came both as a release from his past and a return to it... They also symbolised peace and inner security, as if by returning to them, one can salvage a spark of happiness from the ruins of one’s adulthood... by ‘abstracting’ the image of mountains, he released them from the fixed memory of his childhood and thus eternalised them as something which is part of nature.” (Nirmal Verma, “From Solitude to Salvation”, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 26)

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