K. G. Subramanyan born in Kerala and educated in Santiniketan, is a major presence on the Indian art scene. His flexibility of expression and richness of visual language evolve from the diverse materials he works with as painter, muralist, printmaker, relief-sculptor and designer. In his recent work Subramanyan uses many registers of language to slide from high seriousness to irony, celebration to subversion, descriptive rendering to lyrical evocation, fact to metaphor, and from real to surreal with the ingenuity of a consummate craftsman and the alertness of a nimble thinker.

"Encompassing doodles, scribbles, sketches, studies, calligraphic and tinted drawings, and drawing with pigments; done using ballpoint pen, brush and ink, crayon, alone or in combination with colour or ink washes, and in gouache; and employing graphic devices ranging from marks, scrawls, calligraphic brush work, freehand flourishes, strokes and dabs Subramanyan’s repertoire of drawings is large. But cutting across these differences they are all undertaken to know the world and to think his way through it; to let the world into himself and to write himself onto the world. And looking at his drawings when we see aspects of the world reflected in them, and looking at the world we notice elements of his vision reflected in it, we know he has achieved what he had set out to do" – Prof. R. Siva Kumar