About K.G Subramanyan
Born on 15th February 1924
K. G. Subramanyan, who was born on February 15, 1924, in Kerala, was one of the top painters who aimed to use their work to examine the post-Independence Indian identity. Prior to following his interest in painting to Santiniketan in 1944, where he studied for four years under the guidance of Benode Behari Mukherjee, Nandalal Bose, and Ramkinkar Baij, he earned his bachelor's degree in economics from the Presidency College in Chennai. Subramanyan received a British Council Research Fellowship in 1955 so that he could attend the University of London's Slade School of Art.
Subramanyan is a well-known author, academic, teacher, and art historian. He draws on his extensive knowledge of numerous artistic traditions to produce imaginative images of eroticism and wit that have a universal appeal while also incorporating iconic symbols from Indian stories and folklore.
Subramanyan’s career began in earnest in the 1950s, and his early training in Santiniketan was evident. His early works reflect his development from an impressionable student, influenced by two disparate teachers - Ramkinkar [Baij] and Benode Behari [Mukherjee] - to a young artist assembling the basic foundation of a visual language and vision of his own.
In 1966, Subramanyan was awarded a J D Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship that included a a year-long stay in New York. His persistent interest in semi-abstraction continued to develop throughout this time, bringing new life to established methods by giving them a special plasticity that contemporized and broadened their application.
Subramanyan began to incorporate aspects from a popular bazaar practise of glass painting starting in the 1980s. According to R Siva Kumar, “Subramanyan’s late works were provoking and celebratory, teasing and subversive, humane and irreverent at once. This came partly from his deep engagement with the world and partly from the way he moved from one level of communication, or expression, to another through calculated inflections of his visual idiom. ”
He has had more than fifty solo exhibitions over the course of a nearly seven-decade career, including an extensive 2015–2016 exhibition organised by Kolkata's Seagull Foundation for the Arts in partnership with the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, and the Harrington Street Arts Centre, Kolkata. As a professor of fine arts at M S University in Vadodara, he also served as an inspiration to many students over the years. On June 29, 2016, he passed away in Vadodara at the age of 92. You can browse through our gallery of Serigraphs to see more of his artworks and paintings along with other famous serigraph artists.
