Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Antiquities and Modern and Contemporary Fine Arts | June 2015

V. Ramesh b. 17 August 1958 A Thousand and One Desires (Eyes) Oil on canvas, 2001-02 S/d in English ‘V Ramesh 2002’ on verso Incribed in English ’A Thousand and One Desires, Oil on canvas 2002’ on verso 89.4 x 71.7 in (227.0 x 182.1 cm) Provenance The Osian’s Collection; formerly Delhi based gallery & Artist’s Private Collection Illustrative Reference Chauhan,Tunty (Curator). V. Ramesh. Mumbai:Threshold Art Gallery 2012; pp.159 (col.)/ BOOK.bkc Popular Prakasan (Publisher). V. Ramesh. New Delhi 2012 [Reprinted by Threshold Art Gallery. Contributors - Kamala Kapoor, Madhu jain, Gayatri Sinha, Ranjit Hoskote, among others]. Full Colour Illustration p.159. Exhibited at the World Economic Forum (January) 2011 Congress at Davos as part of “Indian Contemporary Art:The Intuitive- Logic Revisited”. See Colour Illustration in ExC on page 85 & 87. ` 3,000,000 – 4,500,000 US$ 50,000 – 75,000 GBP 30,000 – 45,000 “Ramesh’s large-scale paintings of 2002-2004 carry these impulses forward, with their archetypal symbolisms, their unabashed intertextuality,their use of traditional narrative materials. They function as palimpsests, being layered over with the interplay of image and text, as well as several strata of images. Ramesh demonstrates his ability to tap into an archive of sources, recruiting such inherited idioms as the Tanjore glass painting and the Kalamkari style of epic-making for his improvisation. The human figure remains at the centre of his exploration. Whether naked in the exposure of its instinctual drives or posed in the attitude of the heroic male nude, whether drafted in a coital posture of agitation refined to calm or standing in yogic self- mortification, it is the icon, at once, of vulnerability as well as power. In the laboratory that is Ramesh’s pictorial space, we may assess the relationship among images and what they embody: the larger narratives of self,culture and society. His paintings develop a distinct iconography of desire, lust, passion and choice. Among the protagonist that inhabit Ramesh’s frames are the wise parrot, witness to human lust and cupidity and provider of caveats, whose seventy cautionary tales hail from the celebrated Shuka Saptati cycle. Here, too, we meet an ambivalent blue figure working a healing spell of formulating a curse: a shamanic figure posited between the cautionary parrot and the driven elephant of visceral need. Ramesh also proposes an Indra-Argos figure with a thousand all over his body, redolent of the sculpture of classical antiquity but with the blossom of desire exploding at his carefully poised feet and ghostly architectures of growth smothering the relics of Corinthian capitals around him. In Ramesh’s recent works, phantasms and fleshy bodies inhabit the same frame, so that each painting is vibrant with a sense of lives birthing and evaporating, situations that commit the self to migration as well as transmigration.” – Ranjit Hoskote quoted and reprinted in [BKC, 2012]. Chauhan, Tunty (Curator). V. Ramesh. Mumbai: Threshold Art Gallery 2012; pp.137-139. 79 ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PAINTINGS BY V. RAMESH 168