At Art Basel OVR:20c, we are proud to present a rare collection of Ram Kumar's drawings from the 1960s and 1970s, immediately following the artist's austere "grey" middle period in which he experimented with the encaustic process as well as experienced a heightened crisis of existence before surrendering to the greater anonymity of nature.
Our curation includes a valuable collection of Ram Kumar's drawings compiled in a hard-bound book, featuring thirty-five 7 x 11 inch works made in pen and ink in the 1960s, when the artist was still entranced by the landscapes of Benaras or Varanasi, whose unbounded piety defied any conclusive representation for him. These drawings belong to the artist's personal ledger, which he used to draw in instead of a sketchbook as ledgers were cheaper, referred to as bahis or bahi-khatas, or stitched sheets of paper, once used as account books.
We will also show a series of drawings from the 1970s which articulate another important shift in Kumar's oeuvre from visually inspired to cognitively imagined compositions that focused more on form than content, in turn conversing with an international art scene that was re-articulating creativity in conceptual, minimalist and expressionist terms. The iterative use of line and the spontaneity with which the formless garners shape, these works capture a pivotal moment of transformation in Kumar's career, when his aesthetic influences and personable existentialism developed a synergy he would never return from.
A leading Modernist among first-generation post-colonial Indian artists, Ram Kumar's unique sadhana – the Sanskrit word for a methodical discipline to achieve a desired knowledge or goal – led him to employ a visual language all of his own in his prolific and international career as an artist. In the 1960s, he turned to the illusory constructions of nature, which appeared to him in an interplay of being and nothingness. His deliberate, sensitive and pure use of line resulted in a technical virtuoso, explored with a similar passionate intent in his earlier figurations as well as his later semi-representational landscapes and abstract formations. Critically, his work straddles the spectrum between abstraction and expressionism, though he was wholly committed to neither language. With a much-appreciated spiritual incline in his work, to read a Ram Kumar is to undertake a meditation, to process an image long after it has been seen.
Born in 1924 in Simla, Ram Kumar was a vital member of the fabled Progressive Artists' Group. The artist passed away in 2018 at the age of 93, but continues to be a part of all major Indian art exhibitions, including the recent major exhibition at Asia Society, New York titled 'The Progressives Revolution: Modern Art for a New India' in 2018.