Om Prakash Sharma

Acquired in India, circa early 2000s

Private Collection, Geneseo, New York

Thence by descent

"I saw abstraction at the highest level… for me, abstraction was always there, is here, and will always be here.”

(Om Prakash Sharma quoted in D. Blair, ‘Om Prakash Sharma: Painting, Post-Colonialism and Tantra,’ cineSOURCE, Oakland, 2017)

Born in 1932, Om Prakash Sharma displayed an affinity for art at an early age, receiving a British government scholarship to study drawing and painting in high school. Sharma went on to earn a degree at Delhi Polytechnic before moving to New York to study Art History and Fine Art at Columbia University on a Fulbright Scholarship. While in New York, he befriended several American artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Phillip Guston and the famed Color Field painter Mark Rothko, who admired Sharma and the visual idiom he was developing. Sharma created a painterly language that transcended the limitations of realism, frequently drawing upon Tantric imagery, and felt a deep commitment to the conceptual nature of art.

Hidden Seed is a swirling collage of shapes and colors that expresses the spiritual via symbolism. The brilliant red oval at the center of the composition captures attention and is surrounded by a number of intersecting rounded forms. Beyond these shapes lies a purple background with a rich hue that lightens towards the top of the canvas, where subtle arched streaks of paint give the painting a sense of gentle movement, enlivening the work while still preserving a strong sense of calm.