A long-awaited UAE debut for the veteran Indian artist KG Subramanyan

One of India’s greatest masters is about to have his first exhibition in the UAE, after more than five decades of practising art.

K G Subramanyan – or KGS, as he is popularly known – began studying art in the 1950s and has had a great influence on his country’s art and design traditions.

The exhibition, titled Sketches, Scribbles, Drawings by KG Subramanyan, begins with early sketches from the 1960s and moves on to drawings from the 1970s, black-and-white art from the 1980s, and nature and figure studies from the 1990s before coming right up to date with gouache, or pigment paintings, that are less than a month old.

Although he is now 91 years old, Subramanyan still paints or draws every day.

“When I get up to take my breakfast, the only way to keep me going through the day is to work,” he says. “I always doodle – you could call me a compulsive doodler. It is my way of getting into a relationship with what I see.”

Subramanyan, whose work often focuses on the figure, but also draws on traditional myths and legends as well as embracing the Indian tradition of miniature painting, has become one of India’s most important artists. But, he says, he got into art quite by accident.

“When I started out, I didn’t try to be an artist, I studied for an economics degree,” he says. But after he was jailed for a short time for his participation in the Quit India Movement during the fight for independence, it was difficult to find employment in that field, so he started studying art.

“So, you see, I went into art by default, although I always had a love for it,” he says.

Original article by Anna Seaman

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A long-awaited UAE debut for the veteran Indian artist KG Subramanyan