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Looking into a Well Full Moon - Acrylic on Canvas - 72 x 72-inches-2001

Gieve Patel:
Select Works (1971 – 2006) at Gallery Threshold

A retrospective of the selected works of Gieve Patel opened at Gallery Threshold, New Delhi on September 24, 2009. It is after 17 years that the works of Gieve Patel are being presented in New Delhi.

The works span a period of three decades, from the Seventies to the turn of the Century.
Most of the works are from the Osian’s  Archive Collection with a few coming in from private collectors. Also on display will be few sculptures by Gieve Patel.

According to Patel, “these select works cover a span of about thirty years, from the 1970s to the turn of the century. Each work represents an aspect of my thinking that will surface unpredictably from time to time.

“My interest in day to day encounters between two people is represented in two paintings here: ‘The Letter Home,’ and ‘Hooch Den.’ The urban construction labourer in Mumbai dictates his letter addressed to his far off Andhra home, to a local scribe. In the latter painting, a swarthy tough holds forth before an elderly woman who may well be managing a hooch den inside her hut.

“ ‘Conference Table,’ a painting of the early Seventies, gives the viewer dark and ominous silhouettes of ‘worthies’ sitting round a conference table that is covered by unexplainable luminous markings.

“Paintings without human figures have cropped up twice in all these years. In the Seventies, the architecture of Bombay local railway stations, and the scrub fields around them, like in the painting ‘Lighted Platform’ here, provided me with a subject matter to express my taste for a poetry of hushed stillness in unexpected places. From the Nineties onward, ‘Looking into a Well’, an early boyhood experience relived, opened for me the possibility of magical glimpses while looking into depths  --  found both in outer and inner worlds.

”he sculptures included in this show are on mythical subjects: Ekalavya, and Daphne. My interest in depicting the human body is here given a chance to shed its contemporary dress, and to appear in more elemental form.”

The show will be on view till October 22, 2009.

- From A Correspondent.