Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

87 PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK “ Subramanyan’s contact with surface, whether it is brush, tool or hand, is always light. Just as his eye does not probe - it receives signals quickly - it follows that laying out of surface and contour is rapid, no time is spent obscuring the process. This preference was developed from an apprenticeship at Shantiniketan and the influence of far eastern work ethics: of working spontaneously and discarding whatever is deficient or inappropriate, of the calligraphic principle as a life - force embodying energy, and as a forming device. (Nilima Sheikh, rpt. in Contemporary Art in Baroda , p120). d c “ Subramanyan’s figuration, featuring for the most part the female image, has always suggested a form of sexual discomfiture…At a compulsive level the female body is a plucked and frenzied sign signifying in reverse the fear, the attenuation, the washing away of (male) desire.” (Geeta Kapur, in Mid-Century Ironies: K.G.Subramanyan, rpt. in When was Modernism 2000 , p142).