GIEVE PATEL
Akara Modern
1940 -2023
Born in
1940, a self-taught artist, poet, and practicing general physician, Patel was
one of India’s preeminent painters. He celebrated the pulse of the city and
human conditions on his canvases. His work articulated a mature, restrained
balance between figuration rooted in realistic naturalism and the freedom of
painterly abstraction. Gieve Patel had worked in dialogue with overlapping
communities within the arts, centred in Mumbai since the late 1960s.
Patel explained: “[There] are things that
I have seen, but I do not paint them till they have been with me in my memory
and repeatedly come to my consciousness.” He depicted
the prosaic and the poetic, as well as the horrific in his sketches. Patel drew
inspiration from newspaper photographs of women in the throes of mourning,
abstract line drawings of the movement of clouds, and conceptually driven
paintings of water at the bottom of wells - subjects that had been recurring in
his works for over 20 years.
He began painting multiple figures after he saw 14th-century
painter Pietro Lorenzetti's Crucifixion during a visit to Italy in the
mid-1980s. His artworks portray people and scenes with textural brushstrokes
and swathes of colour. Specially, his close-up 'head' paintings allow the
people he observes to be given 'individual breathing space,' while his more
complex scenes show a closer engagement with daily life.
Patel held
his first solo show in Bombay in 1966. His works were part of numerous major
exhibitions in India and abroad. His shows include; ‘Gateway Bombay’
Peabody Essex Museum, Mass, USA (2007); ‘Multiple Modernities: India,
1905-2005’’ Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (2008); ‘The Body Unbound’, Rubin
Museum of Art, New York (2011); ‘Touched by Bhupen’, Galerie Mirchandani +
Steinruecke, Mumbai (2013); and ‘No Parsi in an island’, National Gallery of
Modern Art, Delhi (2016). He was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in
1984 and the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1992 and been the C.R. Parekh
Writer-in-Residence, Norman Foundation Grant at the University of Pennsylvania
in 2003.
Gieve Patel passed away in Mumbai, 2023.
Images
Exhibitions
Longing Belonging September 12 - October 19 , 2024
Follow Unfollow August 26 - September 17 , 2022
Travelling in Two Boats at the Same Time July 15 - August 31 , 2016
Press
