gieve patel

Gieve Patel
Select Works 1971 - 2006

May 7 - June 11, 2010

These select works by Gieve Patel cover a span of about thirty years, from the nineteen seventies to the turn of the century.

An exhibition of drawings paintings and sculptures, it also spans an array of themes, though the content remains deeply human throughout. If one responds fully to the work, one can always recognize Patel's compete commitment that remains free of trend or compromise, where the work has no middle ground which 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. A well known poet and playwright, 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.

Kamala Kapoor
(an excerpt from the catalog essay)