Women remembered

Kalakriti Art Gallery in collaboration with The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata brings to Hyderabad for the first time an exhibition showcasing drawings of women by renowned and eminent artist, KG Subramanyan.

Given the solid representation of KG Subramanyan’s artistic journey, the exhibition, offers a selection of his images of women, titled as ‘Women seen and Remembered’.

Subramanyan’s oeuvre: images of women occupy a predominant place. Giving the human figure a new dimension - drawing upon the rich resources of myth, memory and tradition, the eminent artist tempers romanticism with wit and eroticism.

The works on view can be divided into three groups - both chronological and typological, with all such divisions, and a few overlaps. A handful of Subramanyan’s early drawings are studies from models, of the kind that art students practise, their main aim being training in observation and an accurate rendering of the visible.

Subramanyan emphasised the sensuousness of the body in a manner seldom seen in traditional Indian art. This visual vocabulary that he lays out in certain drawings from the sixties and early seventies marks the first consolidation of a vision, or an arrival, rather than an absolute beginning.

The impact and influence of early modernists like Binod Bihari Mukerjee, Ram Kinkar Baij and Nandlal Bose, whom Subramanyan was fortunate to have had as his teachers along with his own sensitive and profound philosophy, are facts that have contributed to his long sustained and prolific career.

The exhibition allows viewers to reveal a culture and society that are tumultuously involved in a grand civilisation moment of transition.