Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Antiquities Modern Contemporary Fine Arts and Books | April 2017

95 K.G. Subramanyan 1924-2016 Fighting the Beast Acrylic on canvas, 2007 Singed in Tamil ‘Mani’ l.l. 48.0 x 35.8 in (122.0 x 91.0 cm) Provenance Private Kolkata-based Collection; previously acquired from Seagull Foundation for the Arts who in turn acquired it directly from the artist. INR 1,500,000 – 2,250,000 USD 22,390 – 33,580 96 Ramkumar b.1924 Varanasi Series Acrylic on canvas, 2011 S/d in English ‘Ram Kumar 11’ on verso 24.0 x 36.0 in (61.0 x 91.4 cm) Provenance Private New Delhi-based Collection; previously acquired directly from artist INR 1,800,000 – 2,700,000 USD 26,870 – 40,300 Full double-spread image on pp. 202-203 “We had to have a motif, as went with our personal choice, but as came from what we saw around. We sought these in common things, like a man scratching his back, woman picking her nose, a random heap of things, but we wanted to take them beyond the descriptive and the documentary into something iconic. You could call it apotheosis of the ordinary. This we tried to do in a variety of ways; but usually paralleling the actual by the archetypal, making of the changeable image of common life a stable hieroglyph. A lot of my works of 1925- 55 drawn from ordinary motifs, mother and child, woman at the tap, woman with lamp, or before mirror, fisher folk on Bombay seaside, all, pulled in this direction, from a volatile sketch to a stable hieroglyph.” – K. G. Subramanyan, rpt. in an interview with R. Sivakumar, AHJ 4, 1984 - 85, p. 50. “Closeness to drawings is one of the hallmarks of Subramanyan’s recent paintings. His current mode of painting can be described as drawing with colour or a conflation of colour and painterly marks. Based on empirical experience and presented on a transposed scale, his use of colour can be both expressive and scintillating. And his basic units, ranging from dot to scrawl, are painterly marks with a pronounced gestural verve.” – R. Siva Kumar, rpt. in K.G. Subramanyan: Paintings & Drawings Seagull Travelling ExC.1999; p6. “I think that this balancing of the abstract with the objective is one of the most significant characteristics of the traditional art of my country... This is where I get into contact with it. I want my work to live in such a twilight zone of sensibility, although the ingredients I put into it are not what they used ...but are of this time.” – K.G. Subramanyan, Introduction to the Gallery Navina, New York, 1967. Pichvai is a painting tradition to be used as temple hanging with scenes related to Lord Krishna. Ambiguousness is what Subramanyan’s works represents, giving an idea of the effect of the folk traditions. The lot is inspired by the craft traditions of India but his composition is completely modernist in its approach. “Like memories gone over, he goes over the motifs again and again, rearticulating them differently but with comparable vividness, not of detail, but of gesture. Enlivened by the gestures of life, they represent the changing expressions of the familiar world. And almost imperceptibly written into this pageant of everyday things, their shapes, textures and movements, is also the personal vision of an artist who is choreographer of the world.” – R. Siva Kumar, rpt. in K.G. Subramanyan – Paintings and Drawings : The Seagull Foundation for the Arts ExC.1998; p3. “The counterpoint between city and landscape has long exercised Ram Kumar: to shuttle between them is to know and traverse the discontinuity between home and world. The city, shored up from riversilt, vulnerable to the river’s sullen tides and periodic floods, would appear to symbolize the life of the householder, tramelled by duties, circumscribed by ritual, susceptible to anxiety. The landscape, on the other hand, with its drifts of ice and sand, suggests the open breadth of the cosmos, where the renouncer may wander at will.” – Ranjit Hoskote, rpt. in ‘The poet of the Visionary Landscape’, Ram Kumar: A Journey Within , Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996. ‘Currents swirl from your brush. The sun-wind tilts your frames so drifts of haystack and cloudstream can sweep away hillocks, ridges, emperor’s tombs. This is the storm that Turner saw, stirring slave ships in brine, milling the tribute of silver and spice to spindrift till the whorled cyclonic eye engulfed sun and sky and time within its glowering rim. We lurch downstream, churned by the tempest, our sail thrummed, funneledround its rigging. But you have rowed through floes, thwarted avalanches and cliff falls, left the feldspar ravines of despair behind. These are notations for a landscape that you will throw away once you’ve climbed into the hills, like Wittgenstein’s ladder.’ – Ranjit Hoskote rpt. in Ram Kumar Recent Works Vadehra Art Gallery ExC 2000. Indian Antiquities Modern Contemporary Fine Arts & Books | 201