The word women went on to mean more than its ‘natural’ anatomical and biological denotation by the 1970s, paving the way to the idea of gender and a multitude of discourses that divided the female from the feminine. This disrupted conventions of sex and socio-cultural conditioning that shaped them and gave rise to gendered battles across mediums of expression. These also generated platforms that enabled critical discourses on the subject, object and onlooker based on gender politics. This transformation had a wide-scale impact on artistic practices of the times, often shaking the modern world of its indifference and daunting prospects for male expressions of the period. It is under this umbrella of negotiations, that K.G Subramanyan’s imageries find its place. 

The portrayal of women in artworks during the Bengal Renaissance was often figures like Bharat Mata, that stood for a symbolism (largely for national interest), rather than subjective identity to the character. Examining paintings such as Abanindranath’s Asoka’s Queen or Nandalal’s Gandhari, their aesthetic precision reveals a subtle and idealised nature in the representation of female characters. Though emerging from the Bengal school mentorship and environment, women represented by K. G S, appear to resonate with the common, the non-idealised, the anonymous, but relevant. He draws narrative often from empirical realities, mannerisms extracted from people around him and perceptions from the media. His imageries are mostly a documentation of life around him, which is an amalgamation of elements like female and male figures, animals, and objects with a consistent interplay and subtext.  They open up to a wide range of ocular dimensions and discourses. We come across women who portray themselves as a spectacle, men looking at women and women watching being looked at, women who reciprocate gazes, both fierce and amusing and plenty of examples of figures actively engaged in the mutual act of looking.

His women characters can be roughly categorized into three different thematic sensibilities: the domesticated women adhering to socio-cultural boundaries who can be relatable to the ideal, the ones who embrace their sexuality and are unconfined to male-constructed celebration of biological female and the third with depictions of goddesses and the liberated,  independent women.  When surveying images, a rigid chronological categorization might not always apply due to the revisited appearances of many images. 

Domestic women: In hisworks that address domestic spaces, we come across women engrossed in household chores or preoccupied with gossiping, reading, brooding and relaxing seemingly oblivious to any onlooker. Though thematically similar, it contrasts with genre paintings where women were sitters and archetypes; posing and not relaxing. One can find a greater sense of interaction and relatability between female characters than their male counterparts. These women are portrayed as dutiful in domestic spaces, just in a state of being, devoid of a distinct past or future, and often self-obsessed. Even in the couple series, men are apparently less dynamic, portrayed as either peeping through a coloured grid or resembling photo frames. In the images where male and female coexist, at times women hold a confrontational gaze and in others (ex; The Parsi couple), they seem to exist as two isolated sexes or entities who are totally unrelated to each other. While not overtly confronting patriarchy, there is a permeating feeling of gloominess and tiredness connected to the ambience of domesticity as a patriarchal construct. Women discover their agencies within alternative power dynamics by uniting elsewhere in the frame to share and explore their common issues. 

  Women Embracing Sexuality: The second category brings in a sense of explicit eroticism (which encompasses a major area of his works), which is largely inspired by erotic Chinese glass paintings, Indian miniature and folk art and also parallels his virility and wit in his poetries. They seem to own their bodies and gestures rather than be trapped in a body (domestic images), thus making it more subjective. They are largely either in close-ups with unconventional gestures like the 1980s series of women or gridded narratives. They are self-conscious, assertive, and sensual and participate in voyeuristic engagements, yet caricaturish which triggers the enigmatic intersection of sringara with hasya which is often not served on the same plate. This can be elucidated with a comparison of Radha Rani, Reverie of an Army Man’s Wife and Radha and Krishna. In Radha Rani, the woman is sexually teasing in a frame with two men below, one shocked and the other confused. While resembling images from films, commercials, and Pinups, the men express a sense of discomfort with expressive women. The second reference, with its title Army Man’s Wife, seems to be more of a war of sexual unmatchability, again with a sense of discomfort, and the third example, a clothed lady gazing strongly at the spectator, with a local man with a blue face, and glasses staring at her in the frame behind, probably an emblem of the fetish and obsession of society. They seem more performative than real expressions, iterating with a sense of societal gaze and scrutiny yet humorous and unconfined, and remind of the Looking Glass theory of Charles Cooley. It brings in the question of whether these titillating and teasing female figures stimulate the viewers or make them uncomfortable. While nudity and sexual urges are associated with visual pleasures, these female bodies and gestures seem more overt, repugnant, or sexually clownish, raising the question of whether they are attractive or repulsive. This can prompt the artist’s psyche and bring in an enigma of gendered sexual fallacies and a twitch of uncanny cynicism.

The breastfeeding series from 1998 appears very performative with loud gestural implications that resemble a mockery akin to men performing as women in dance forms like Kathakali. These are figures with blue, brown and white colours and distinct facial features probably denoting various ethnographies. The portrayal of mother and child (often breastfeeding/ nursing) has been an iconic image for centuries, steeped in nostalgia and used as metaphors for compassion, yet often exploited as a pretext for voyeurism. KGS reiterates these imageries, but with unconventional gestures and expressions that appear like they don’t enjoy the biological act. Could this indicate the widely unaddressed discomfort among women regarding their bodies and the biological acts they engage in or embrace their motherhood?

At this juncture, it’s crucial to investigate whether eroticism holds identical meaning for both sexes. In a dialogue on the same regarding KGS’s works, art historian R Shiva Kumar discusses on the complications of analyzing his women representations in isolation for which he quoted from American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt in the catalogue Women Seen and Remembered, “Of course women are sexual objects; so are men” goes on to say sexual excitement are culturally conditioned.

  Considering this debatable juncture, it doesn’t seem to just cease at the sketchy panoramic reading of images as erotically eloquent. A keen observation of the multitude of his compositions can reveal that there is no parallel between the sexualization of women’s bodies and male bodies. Male nudes are depicted in the same pictorial effects, but often in a non-sexual action or as a voyeur, whereas the female bodies are explicitly virile, unusually clownish and objectified at the same time breaking the axiological and evoking the subversive. They are also juxtaposed with male animals (ref: R Shiva Kumar) and birds like roosters and cats, largely associated with fables and sexual fantasies. Though there are no evident signs of violence or suppression of women, it’s difficult to un-see the imperious setup under which the figures and gestures look overt and crudely humorous. Also, one can’t sense their age, but probably only through their erotic gestures and other biological inhibitions in the form of action, we realize that most of them are in their youth and not elderly women. It brings profound questions; did the artist unconsciously bring an ingrained philosophical distrust towards body and flesh, which also coincided with disenfranchising women’s subjectivity? It also prompts questions about who exactly embodies the discomfort as a spectator-whether it’s the male or female observer.

Goddess & the Liberated Women: The third category largely consisted of goddesses and liberated women characters. With its flamboyant colours, it often brought in influences of the Devi worship in Bengal, iconographic references from mythologies, folklores and various elements from the new urban, educated, independent women. Moving away from his semiotics of eroticism, we come across female figures as powerful, riding on tigers and avenging, slaying Mahishasuras and other animal symbolisms aligned with women armed with weapons of modernity. They are vigorous, and animated and their existence stands independently, unconnected to any male presence and often masked and double articulated opening thoughts on masquerade and self fashioning. In this context, the grids and interior settings fade away, allowing figures to float within abstract spaces, as KGS seamlessly merges the mythical into the modern milieu where spaces of femininity are on discourse.

With a resounding consensus, the allure of eroticism, dark humor, social awareness and skill in deploying visual devices pervades the essence of KGS’s art practice. These works navigate varied emotional landscapes, oscillating between different moods and attitudes that bear witness to changing notions of womanhood. He endeavours to depict the agency of women through these diverse categorizations through an evident theatre of action that comments on demarcated and gendered spatial powers. While labelling him as a feminist is not an easy possibility, it is interesting to observe his visual articulations on feminism and how modernism thrives on the ambiguous spaces of femininity. Amidst the era saturated with media-driven imagery, mechanical reproductions, and reinterpreted classical mythologies—where women embody diverse symbolisms—extracting straightforward meanings from KGS’s paintings becomes increasingly challenging. However, interestingly, our understanding of KGS’s art is often influenced by the interpretations filtered through the perceptive lens of R Shiva Kumar, whose writings have significantly shaped perspectives on KGS’s works. Despite the veneer of modernity, he seems to share allegiance with those who romanticize the past, albeit without emphasizing its resurrection and seems to distance himself from postmodernist sensibilities.

His works attempt to project the world as it is, with a greater emphasis on visuality itself and assisted by assorted amalgamation of imageries from various spheres of life, imagination, myths, and often dreams. In his paintings, terracotta reliefs or toys, he invokes a sense of play and puzzle, where the elements and figures seem to be appearing and disappearing like in a magic show. However, it is interesting to contemplate that amidst the contemporary realm of post-modernism, post-object and post-visual phases of consciousness and artistic endeavours, where do we position KGS? Does his legacy and contribution resonate more with the spirit of today, or does it serve as a unique link between past and contemporary artistic expressions, navigating formalistic debates and gender discourses of its era?