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Lot 148

Ram Kumar (India, born 1924)
Ruins

17 March 2014, 13:00 EDT
New York

Sold for US$35,000 inc. premium

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Ram Kumar (India, born 1924)

Ruins
Oil on canvas, framed
Signed and dated '72 lower left.
55 1/4 x 33 in. (140.3 x 84 cm)

Footnotes

In the 1960s Ram Kumar dispensed with figuration and transitioned to far more abstracted landscapes. As noted by Hoskote, "...Kumar addressed himself to the formal aberrations of mismatched planes, jamming the horizontal perspective against top views inspired by site-mapping and aerial photography, and locking the muddy impasto-built riverbank constructions into a Cubist geometrical analysis. Gradually, the architecture drained away from his canvases: society itself passed from his concerns." (Hoskote, 'Parts of a World: Reflections on the Art of Ram Kumar', Ram Kumar Recent Works, Saffronart and Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, p. 6).

The dramatic palette of dark browns and ochre applied in intersecting shards enclose fractured and splintered elements around a narrow space of white that may well reflect images from the Himayalas as noted further by Hoskote "...the landscape became its own architecture. Ram Kumar began to commemorate vast, epic images...The paintings of this third and continuing phase, elaborated in Ram Kumar's hallmark palette of ochre, ultramarine, sienna and viridian, carry a sharp whiff of pine from the Shivaliks, the Himalayan foothills. We sense, in them, the aura of Shimla, where the artist spent his childhood, and of Andretta, the village in the Kangra valley to which he retreats periodically, to replenish himself."

Works from the same period are held by the Glenbarra Museum, Japan. Two others were sold by Christie's, New York, 13 September 2011, lot 57 and 20 September 2007, lot 97, and another by Saffront Art, 16-17th April 2012, lot 33.

Provenance:
Private Collection since 1980s
Acquired in New Delhi by the parent in the early 1970s

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