A versatile artist peeps into the inner recesses of wells and minds

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. His drawings, paintings and sculptures encompass an array of themes, though the content remains deeply human throughout.

In an accompanying note to his retrospective exhibition at Mumbai's Gallery Chemould in 2010, critic Kamala Kapoor has mentioned: “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.

"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. “

Analyzing his ‘Wells’ series, renowned art critic Ranjit Hoskote has stated: “In his paintings of wells, Gieve Patel shifts into a freer, more lyrical and even abstractionist gear: mirror and womb, archetypal world-navel and tunnel into inner space, the well is a site of revelation for Patel; we look over its ledge into a vision of the cosmic, held in counterpoint by a miniature geography of stone, root and slime. This general account must not lead us to regard the "Wells" series as being either idyllic or generic: each well is distinctive, animated, disturbing, and no less a portrait for portraying an object rather than a human being.

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.