K.S. Kulkarni's Lithe Lines at Shridharani

Time of India

3 days ago

Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 35 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE
Over 35 years of writing one has always been drawn to artists who love drawing and weave it into their alchemy of forms. Drawing is as much about life as it is about communication. K.S.Kulkarni, a master, former Vice Chairman LKA ,was known for the treatment of light and form and depth of vision, and the techniques of creating works that belonged to both modernism and contemporary reality.
Gallerie Ganesha, famous for its work for more than three decades in Delhi, opens Esoteric Expressions at Shridharani in Triveni Kala Sangam next week, with an exhibition of Karnataka born K.S.Kulkarni who made Delhi his home. The founder president of Delhi Shilpi Chakra in 1948, Kulkarni created works that embodied the ' soul of the people' and a ' process of progress.'
Still lifes and people
At Shridharani the art lover is drawn into an embrace of art as a tool that at once reflects and responds to a range of presentations highlighting the variety within the expression and discourse surrounding modernity. The faces with fragmented contours, the lucid still life, the human figures and drawings with neatly abstracted veneers all seem to unpack a number of narratives pertaining to the undercurrents of modernism. His exploration of contemporary idioms resonate through his strong use of colour and his love for creating a corollary of conversations that sift and sieve through time.
Pictorial language in portraits
His portraits on paper and canvas hold their own.Lithely drawn forms clearly composed in animated silence with a sense of balance and harmony even as they have Picassoic preferences, have a certain enchantment about them.While he fills the forms with subtle softness it is the textured background and the eyes that catch your gaze for its simplicity and its candour.
According to gallerist Shoba Bhatia, who has followed his works over decades, Kulkarni, born in a village in Belgaum in Karnataka in 1916, engaged with modernist techniques and mediums to create a his own individual pictorial language.The thickened black lines echo an inchoate intensity.Command over colour and contour become the dominant signature.
The flute player
Kulkarni imbued his figurative works with the classical grace of Ajanta paintings and a distinctive modernist spirit. If some works evoked village life and seemed to carry the melody of a flute being played in the distance, his human figures showed grace and rural rhythms rising up in strong outlines. However, he neither idealised rural life nor disparaged urban existence—choosing to paint life as he experienced it.
Mother and child
His mother and child studies in the show are about life and lines, and human empathy and eternal love between mothers and offspring. He also draws our attention to a cross section of humanity that cuts across all boundaries. We are at once held in the connectivity of a group of different people living and working together in harmony and the beauty of relationships.Expression and the eloquence of poetic realities all become a part of this suite of works.
For Kulkarni drawing was the building block of painting. From techniques such as highlights and reserves, to material selection and the creation of the use of light and shading as a medium, artists for hundreds of years have found innovative ways to create light's textural terrain on a single sheet of paper.And this exhibition is a lesson in this artistic attainment.
Kulkarni examined silently the central relationship between paper and light in the world of drawings and paintings in his life. Focusing on drawings from the collection we are enticed into a visual essay on lines and compositional clarity, as we look longer and more closely at these works and derive an even deeper appreciation for the skill, imagination and labour that went into them.
This exhibition runs like an elegy ,and brings back the words of Jagdish Swaminathan the great abstractionist,author and and artist who in the year 1989, wrote about his friend Kulkarni : ' Kulkarni carries within him the supreme tranquility of a man in harmony with the cosmos, facing life's problems with the calm bearing of a sage. The personality of the artist is expressed with remarkable lucidity in his works, and each of his canvases is a little gift of peace and solace to the troubled Souls of his fellow men.'
Images: Gallerie Ganesha
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