Town

Ram Kumar over his long and illustrious career as an artist has created works with an unmatched consistency and integrity. His art is characterized by grace, intent and verve, full of movement and sweeping strokes. Some forms seem to dissolve in the background while some maintain their angularity and grid. Ram Kumar’s work, mostly abstract, delineates traces of forms from ruins, city houses, hills, trees, water-bodies, boats etc. His forms even in his figurative works have been rendered with a semi-abstract stylization. He builds up wondrous landscapes or as art critic Richard Bartholomew observed ‘inscapes’. Done in both somber as well as glowing colours his work initiates a warm and intimate dialogue with the viewer.

In ‘Town’ done in the 50’s, the setting is urban, the skyline, the streets and even the figure in the foreground have been flattened and simplified almost like a dream sequence. The reduction of all the elements to their essential forms eventually urged the artist towards abstraction. Figurative paintings of Ram Kumar are comparatively rare.