The two gallerists who started Debovasha had interviewed K.G. Subramanyan (1924-2016) on two occasions when the artist had given them some drawings to be published along with the lengthy interviews in book form. The exhibition, Living Tra­dition, featured those drawings and more and was held a couple of months before the master’s birth centenary celebrations began. It preceded a series of larger and more comprehensive exhibitions that followed thereafter.

These small, black-and-white drawings were the kind that Subramanyan would produce with effortless ease and were extensions of the larger paintings and other compositions that he created in several media. The smaller works could occasionally be repetitive but they were all part of his polymorphic vision, which saw no difference among cultures and legacies of diverse histories and lands, and between human and animal lives. Hence, in his works, all differences collapse and everything exists simultaneously with little regard for variations in time and space.

This was a small show where the exhibits were not for sale. So there was a drawing of Durga (picture, left) alongside a sketch of a colourful, contemporary living room with its typically spare décor. Next to it was a tiny panel showing birds and beasts of the jungle. He seemed to love snarling cats and they are all over these small drawings too, invading a dovecote, metaphorically speaking. The four portraits on display were typical of Subramanyan’s faces drawn from various cultures. These were all done with enviable ease by an artist who continued to draw and paint almost till his last days in spite of his ailments.

There were exotic women as well, accompanied by their screeching feline and avian friends (picture, right). Here we got an indication that he saw no contradiction between abstraction and realism either. Santiniketan, where he developed as an artist, always haunted him and in this show he retur­ned to his favourite subject. These were all part of Sub­ramanyan’s huge corpus of works and provided only glimpses of a colourful ta­pestry with fascinating details.