KNMA the first-ever retrospective of the veteran artist Jeram Patel titled ‘the dark loam: between memory and membrane’. Sadly, Jeram Patel passed away this year in January when the museum was in the midst of preparation for this very exhibition. This is the last exhibition of the trilogy of retrospectives that examines abstraction in Indian art from the early post-Independence period. We began with Nasreen Mohamedi’s ‘a view to infinity’ (2013), then presented Himmat Shah’s ‘hammer on the square’ (January - July 2016) and now Jeram Patel (August 2016). The trilogy emphasizes different individual trajectories of abstraction, through a large corpus of works, allowing viewers to examine their singular practice and their contribution in the shaping of Modern Indian art in the 1960s-70s. While Nasreen never affiliated herself to any group and worked in complete solitude in her studio/home, Jeram and Himmat were founder members of Group 1890 along with ideologue J. Swaminathan and other fellow artists- Gulammohammed Sheikh, Ambadas, Jyoti Bhatt, Rajesh Mehra, Eric Bowen, Raghav Kaneria, Redeppa Naidu, S.G. Nikam. The Group did not last beyond their first group exhibition. The manifesto written by Mexican poet Octavio Paz in 1963 emphasized their belief in ‘the reality of an image rather than the image of reality’. The image in Himmat and Jeram is abstracted, excavated or assembled into a composite form. Though their language of abstraction evolved its own syntax and vocabulary, the series of exhibitions highlight the possible points of crisscrossing and connections that can be drawn between their preoccupations and manifested forms. Their distinct ways of responding to the world does not fit into any preceding style or group. Drawing remained of primary importance to all the three artists, using pen and ink as well as graphite, relying heavily on the mystery of the monochromatic image.