An exhibition of select works by Gieve Patel

A new exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculptures by Gieve Patel cover a span of about thirty years, from the nineteen seventies to the turn of the century. It spans an array of themes, though the content remains deeply human throughout.

A self-taught artist dedicated to multiple professions, Gieve Patel has imaged a sensitive and acute awareness of the human condition throughout a 40-year painting practice. Sourcing inspiration from the quietude of nature and the pulse of the city, his work articulates a mature, restrained balance between figuration rooted in realistic naturalism and the freedom of painterly abstraction.

Along with three books of verse and three plays, he has written extensively about contemporary Indian art and, until recently was also a practicing physician. In an accompanying note to his latest exhibition at Mumbai's Gallery Chemould, critic Kamala Kapoor notes:

“Gieve Patel has long drawn and painted the ordinary, in terms of the everyday, and also the extraordinary, in terms of deprivation and dispossession in a way that draws these features out, in a way that might never have been particularly noticed before they came to be on the artist's paper and canvas.

"That the 'action' inevitably side-steps despair, is among the many strengths of the artist's works where, instead and exploitation of emotional consequence, the protagonists with their calculated awkwardness of figures, often go on to acquire a strange dignity along with a retrieval of lost humanitarian significance and a sense of social and spiritual identity."

If one responds fully to the work, one can recognize the artist's commitment free of trend or compromise. Here the work has no middle ground that can lean this way or that, and where his art has been for him a means of probing reality, nature and human experience, much of it refracted through a belief, a conviction, a world view.