Roobina Korde talks about K G Subarmanyan memorial exhibition to GANITA while exploring the nuances of anatomy lessons
He opened up grounds for artists to rethink the idea of being modern by staying in the Indian context. While he conceptualised this idea he never built boundaries around him. He was someone who loved to go through the whole spectrum of visual language to understand how people, images and cultures evolve with time. KG Subramanyan’s artworks are deriving inspiration from various traditions but still are not imitating any. “It is not about emulating something; it is about taking something ahead. Just the understanding was amazing and that is why he always said that craft must serve to articulate your conceptual inside. This is not only about skills but the understanding of the process of creating image,” says Roobina Karode, director, Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts. She has curated the exhibition, Anatomy lessons, in memory of KG Subarmanyan which is put up in KNMA.
“KNMA had acquired about ninety works of KG last year. I had really not thought of putting this exhibition because I was working on it in terms of looking at the art pieces that we had acquired. Some of these works were of his early period, the time when he started working. Unlike other artists KG had preserved his initial works. It looked like he wanted to go back to where he started. The initial idea was not showing his very accomplished work but to look back into time and show what was happening in 1940s and 1950s. Then unfortunately and sadly he passed away,” tells Roobina. She continues, “Once he had broken his leg and I went to meet him. He was still drawing on a big notebook and continued to maintain the same energy and this fascinated me. After his departure from life I thought that doing a memorial gathering and making people speak about him for five minutes would defy the meaning of tribute for such a great artist. And that was when I finally made up my mind to do an exhibition on him. We pulled out the works and we actually worked very quickly on this exhibition, just ten or twelve days.”
When asked about the title of the exhibition Roobina said, “When he started his career it seemed that he was extremely receptive and extremely open to learning from a lot of traditions, even the disparate ones. I called it Anatomy lessons because if you look there is one set that runs through the exhibition which is about anatomy. He has also written a poem on anatomy lessons, which is there in the exhibition. The word anatomy has been derived from his terracotta piece which talks about dismemberment of bodies in a very sad and tragic way. He worked on it post the 2002 riots in Ahmedabad and Baroda. I remember a lot of artists telling me about the violence that they saw at their doorsteps. People were ripped apart in front of them. KG’s response as an artist to these human atrocities is very powerful. Anatomy lessons are basically taught in laboratories. But now they could be seen in streets and that’s what he says in his poem which has been put up in the exhibition.” She went forward, “I have taken it as an overstretched title that you start with anatomy lessons which are much more playful and experimental and something that he is learning through the process and then later years he does this terracotta. When you see these kinds of fatal gestures fallen down, limbs apart, fragmented bodies, it has a very different connotation.”
KG never used art as reportage. He was into documenting life in it’s real sense. He was reacting to social and political situations through his art. Whatever he sensed and felt, he used to put it in a very creative way. He was really good at wit and sarcasm. This can be seen throughout the exhibition. “This is why I call him a magician or a puppeteer. He had the ability to animate gestures and make his figures communicate. This is what the crux of the exhibition is. He has been such a versatile artist that it is so difficult to put his life in words and images. At the very modest scale I wanted to show his presence with the use of text by him in the exhibition and that has been done successfully, I guess,” says Roobina.
Archival material from Asian Art Archive, which runs through seminal times in his artistic journey, has also been put up along with his other works. One can see works which are on paper, works which are on cloth, on canvases, oil on board and reverse paintings in acrylic and glass in the exhibition. All these passages of this great persona as an artist would just touch whoever comes to see the exhibition, be it students, artists, friends and peers. “That was the intention of putting up the exhibition. Asia art archive has archived his entire life. When we contacted them they shared with us some excerpts of their digital archive,” she tells us.
Different disparate styles of art have been shown in the exhibition. Somewhere there are very heavy black lines, somewhere very delicate tones can be seen, watercolour somewhere, works on silk cloth in some artworks.
“When you start putting an exhibition, everything cannot be controlled right from the beginning. We have included some works from 2000s also. It was good to have a glimpse of his whole life. It is also to show that the creative soul never dies in an artist. It always keeps evolving. If asked to redraw any of his works he would have never been able to. It’s so instinctive. An artist has to express continuously,” says Roobina winding up the conversation.