Gieve Pattel

Gieve Pattel 
" The Letter Home "
Acrylic On Canvas
2002 
GIEVE PATEL belongs to that avant-garde grouping of artists based in Bombay and Baroda, who substantially altered the trajectory of post-colonial Indian art in the mid-1960s. Positioning themselves against the modernist sublime of the Schools of Paris and New York favoured by their immediate predecessors, they emphasised a politically engaged awareness of locality.

Deploying combinations of ironic autobiography, everyday observation and ludic fantasia, they conveyed the textures of the here-and-now, replete with the realities of labour, gender inequality, alternative sexual preference and the grotesque. Within this new spectrum of possibilities, Patel chose to focus on the streetscapes of daily life, as occupied by the marginal figure in various avatars, whether proletarian (as in his series of railway porters of the 1970s) or immiserated and destitute (as in his ironically titled “Gallery of Man” series that unfolded, through the 1980s, as a dedication to victimage, featuring, among others, a eunuch, a drowned woman and a leper). In recent years, even as he has pursued this lexicon of subaltern figures — expressionistically rendered in homage to suffering and fortitude — Patel has allowed himself a glimpse of transcendence, through the recurrent motif of the changing and magical reflections held by a deep well.
Patel lives and works in Mumbai.