An Indian artist, Ram Kumar, created an artistic work titled 'Homage to Varanasi, 1987' using oil on canvas. It is now exhibited in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
- Identifier
- ngma-13371
- Material
- Oil, Canvas
- Note
- Ram Kumar grew up in a large middle class family with 8 other siblings in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, it was while he was pursuing his masters in Economics from St. Stephens, New Delhi, he got interested in Art and started practicing on his own. _x000D_Ram Kumar, after practicing as a self taught artist for a whille took evening classes at the Sharada Ukil School of Art which was one of the two main centers of activity in the later half of 1940's in visual arts other being the AIFACS, under Sailoz Mookherjee. He left the country to study further in Paris under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger, two major painters of France._x000D__x000D_He has been awarded with the John D. Rockefeller III Fellowship, New York, 1970; Padmashree, Government of India, 1972; Padma Bhushan, Government of India, 2010 and a fellowship by Lalit Kala Academy and also the Officers Arts et letters, Government of France, 2003. _x000D_Ram Kumar, an important landscape painter, (also a writer), obviously seems to have inherited his aesthetic ideals from the Paris school during his French experience which has left a deep mark on his artistic approach. His landscape provide a remarkable illustration of how flat areas of light and dark are organized on the pictorial surface with three-dimensional considerations that are only representational. Though his paintings appear to be spontaneous, they are, in fact, carefully built up to achieve a dynamic feeling of asymmetry and relief to our aesthetic sensibility. _x000D_From 60's onwards, the figure dissapears and the image of the physical world, that is of land forms, rocks, hills, houses, birds, stretches of water, sky and clouds; nature in totality with its varied physiognomy seems to engage him. His landscapes, actual (such as Varanasi) or imaginary, offer a scope for form-structure manipulation wherein the subject and style mutually support each other.
- Pages
- 208 X 152 cm
- Published in
- India
- Type
- Painting
