The Tale of Kantha 2
For me, Kantha is not simply a tradition of stitching old pieces of cloth together. It is connected to my childhood, my memories, and the stories I grew up with. I have slept on Kantha quilts and watched elderly women make them from worn-out clothes. Each small stitch seemed to carry something of their lives—their experiences, memories, and everyday stories.
I try to bring this personal memory and tradition into my paintings in a contemporary way. The figures and forms these women created from old pieces of cloth have influenced the way I develop my own figures. I have taken the shapes, cuts, layers, and character of those cloth figures and transformed them into my own visual language through painting.
For me, these figures are not just forms. They carry traces of labour, memory, and a tradition that is slowly disappearing from everyday life. I am not trying to reproduce Kantha as it once was. Instead, I look to its memory and its way of creating figures, bringing these elements into my own contemporary practice.
The Tale of Kantha is an attempt to carry a part of this fading tradition into the present through my paintings, while giving it a new form through my own visual language.
Ram Dongre came to painting through his father, a maker of festival idols in Madhya Pradesh: images created to be venerated, then dissolved. Ram's method is erasure. He builds layered paintings from the Puranic tradition - gods, goddesses, the flora and fauna of Indian fable and miniature - then removes them, layer by layer, until what remains is colour in arrest: the preserved residue of fuller images that once were. His Sesh Avshesh series reads the deteriorating murals of Ajanta and Bhimbetka back onto the painter's surface. Named by Forbes as one of seven artists to watch at the London Art Fair 2025 and currently in residence with the Embassy of Germany in New Delhi, Ram's work is held in the collections of Kumar Mangalam Birla, Boston Consulting Group, and Mindscreen, among others.
198
137
Submit an application
We will inform you about the availability of the product by phone after checking
