Uma Shankar Shah is one of Nepal's most versatile and original artists. He has worked in oil, pen and ink and water colour. His present exhibition of oil paintings titled 'Glimpses of Kathmandu', being showcased in Park Gallery at Lazimpat, is an exposition of the artist's evolution in terms of content, the medium and mode of expression. The process of abstraction of the gods and goddesses and places of worship assume deeper spiritual overtones, colours become functional to expound the Hindu philosophy of kama (love), krodha (anger), bhaya (fear) and mrityu (death) are integrated in the work.

After graduating from print, Shah explored his relationship with Kathmandu's urban environment. In works produced under the title 'Cityscape', his soul searching reveals a dissonance between the innocent life of his village days and the complicated Kathmandu web of eroding spiritual values. The abstraction of nature in his early works are replaced by the abstraction of his own spiritual consciousness executed through warm hues.

In the current exhibition, he has used the ordinary image of a net and transformed it into a metaphor to synthesise the two opposite worlds of materialism and spirituality. Does this suggest that the deities are trapped in the net of materialism and blind modernisation of Kathmandu and need to be liberated to restore us our spiritual health? Or does it just remind us how entrapped we are in the net of our own material pursuits, losing our spiritual consciousness?

This interplay between the two realms of our consciousness-the sacred and profane-through the image of a net lends a dramatic tension to Shah's paintings.

They invite us to take part in his soul-searching to discover the true nature of our own self.

(Shailendra K Singh)