Ram Kumar trained in economics and briefly worked as a banker and journalist before receiving informal art lessons in Delhi from Sailoz Mukherjee at the Sarada Ukil School of Art. He then began exhibiting his work in 1948. Kumar’s trajectory as an artist and writer is believed to reflect his own reclusive self. Parallels have been drawn between his depiction of the human figure in painting and the characters in the narrative short stories he wrote as a prolific Hindi fiction writer. Both are saturated with a sense of alienation, solitude, and pathos that Kumar considered the existential condition of contemporary urban life. In Women (1953), the four figures are shorn of any context of time and place; there is a dearth of cultural markers such as clothing and an absence of any elements other than the torsos that fill the pictorial space. Kumar travelled extensively in the Global North and South, and his work was feted and exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions in India, Europe, the United States, and Japan, including at the Tokyo Biennale (1957, 1959), Bienal de São Paulo (1961, 1965, 1980), and La Biennale di Venezia (1958).
—Latika Gupta
