Ram Kumar was an artist engaged in lifelong experimentation. A thirst to travel took him to Paris in 1949 where he studied European art techniques and learned the French language. He was a recipient of the Rockefeller Fellowship in the early seventies. He engaged in transforming and refining the world around him, going from the abstract to landscapes and cityscapes to figurative works with ease. A great sensitivity to tragedy can be felt in his work and a sense of pity for the human race can be seen in the starkness and melancholic choice of colour. His cityscapes interrogates the brokenness of modern, urban life. In 1972, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian Government.

"If a conceptual technique could masquerade as an artist's language, then abstraction was the chosen form of narrative for Ram Kumar. From the buoyant golden and blue strokes of the countries and their cities he explored, to the melancholic, earthy sweeps of ochre, viridian and aquamarine seen in his pivotal journey to Varanasi in the 60s - artist Ram Kumar's stories are replete with visual metaphors, one that are transcendental in expressions, and yet rooted in his artistic vocabulary." - Pallavi Pundir (in an article for Architectural Digest on 19th April 2018).

Here, in this untitled 2006 acrylic on canvas work, there are no subjects, drawing on into a feeling of solitary aloneness. It is a cityscape with magnificent hues of greens and blues that make up the horizon below which in muddy white is the urban architecture with Ram Kumar's hallmark abstract form.

"Kumar was exclusively devoted to the motif of the abstract cityscape, while the rest of the artists of his generation were devoted to semi-figurative forms that drew on post-Cubism." - Pallavi Pundir (in an article for Architectural Digest on 19th April 2018).