Invitation
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Shanti Panchal:
Shanti Panchal was born in Mesar, a village in Gujarat, India, and studied at the Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay.
He came to England on a British Council scholarship to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London from 1978-80, and has lived and worked in London since - with annual winter visits to
India.
He has been artist-in-residence at the British Museum, the Harris Museum in Preston and the Winsor & Newton Art Factory in London. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Britain and abroad.
One-person exhibitions have included:
1988-9 Earthen Shades: Paintings by Shanti Panchal, organisedby Cartwright Hall, Bradford and Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, which went on to tour ten public galleries
1992 The Royal Festival Hall, London
1993 Shanti Panchal: New Paintings, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford
1998-9 Shanti Panchal: The Windows of the Soul at Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham and Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, and touring
2000 Shanti Panchal: Private Myths, Pitshanger Gallery, London and touring to:
2001 Cartwright Hall, Bradford, Blackburn Museum and Art Galleries, and
2002 Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry
2003 Shanti Panchal: A Personal Journey, a British Council touring exhibition in India
2007 Shanti Panchal: In the Mind's Eye, Chelmsford Museum, 2007.
He is renowned for his watercolour paintings, and has received awards at the John Moores Painting Prize, Liverpool and the BP Portrait Award, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and won first prize in The Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition in 2001, and in 2012 the second prize in The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition.
In 1989 The Imperial War Museum commissioned his painting The Scissors, The Cotton and the Uniform, and in 2012 also acquired his painting The Boys Returned from Helmand for their Collection.
He contributed to a touring show At the Edge: British Art 1950-2000, at Touchstones Rochdale; Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston; Gallery Oldham and Bolton Museum & Art Gallery during 2009-10.
He was included in the Tate Britain-initiated exhibition Watercolour in Britain: Tradition and Beyond, touring Castle Museum, Norwich; Millennium Gallery, Sheffield and Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle during 2010-11.
Public and Corporate CollectionsArts Council Collection, London
B. Arunkumar/Rosy Blue Group, Mumbai
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery
British Museum, London
Cartwright Hall, Bradford Museum and Galleries
Co-operative Group, Manchester
De Beers Group, London
H. Goldie and Co, London
Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston
Harrow Council, London
Homerton University Hospital, London
Imperial War Museum, London
Lalit Kala Academy, Ahmedabad
Leicestershire Museums
Meghraj Bank, London
Meghraj Group, Jersey
New Art Gallery Walsall
Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery
Pottteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent,
Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Collection, London
Singer & Friedlander Group, London
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Winsor & Newton, London
His one person show will be at the Piano Nobile Gallery in Holland Park, London (please contact on: 020 7229 1099) from 15th May to 8th June 2013, and touring.
For further information please contact Matthew Travers at Piano Nobile Gallery.
T 020 7229 1099
M 07717574363
E [email protected]
Exhibition Catalogue:
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Writers On Shanti Panchal
His... ‘are luminous images of great poise and dignity, which quite often attain a gravity unusual incontemporary portraiture... Shanti Panchal, through a thorough understanding of interval and placement and palette which is both powerful and subtle, makes paintings of rare poetry and eloquence.’
Andrew Lambirth (‘Luminous Serenity’, The Spectator, February 2007)
‘We soon recognise that these paintings are deeply personal and not illustrations... We can tell, even without his confirming it, that each image speaks from a particular experience, re-enacting it in a transformed and concentrated form... The emotional resonance of his actors is that of a few notes struck without vehemence amid silence. The results are not only beautiful - which makes them seem complete in themselves - but profoundly moving. All they ask from us is attention and openness. To ask this is the essential task of art today.’
Norbert Lynton (catalogue essay for the artist’s touring Private Myths exhibition, 2000)‘Executing only a few pictures each year, Panchal devotes himself to each succeeding image with an absolute contemplative commitment. The slowness of his approach, outlining the composition initially in pencil and then building up more than a dozen layers of watercolour wash on the thick, rough paper he favours, is akin to a meditative exercise... The tension between [his characters] is highly dramatic... Panchal insists on retaining the flatness of the picture plane even when distances are evoked. It accentuates the feeling in his pictures of expectancy and compression. But it also lends clarity to his work, giving directness and immediacy of impact. Only after a while... does the enigmatic flavour of Panchal’s art become apparent as well.’
Richard Cork (catalogue essay for the artist’s touring Windows of the Soul exhibition, 1988-9)‘The sacred and unwordly atmosphere Panchal achieves shatters local and individual particularity and reassembles his subjects as symbols, enigmatic, potent and unsettling migrants between the here-and-now and the world of dreams... The atmosphere of inner spiritual vitality emanates from the hieratic stillness of his figures, it springs from his subjects’ huge eyes, which remain almond-like or round in profile, too, as in Indian miniatures, and it gathers in the darkened centre of their foreheads, the site of the Shiva’s third eye, the mystical core of intuitive vision...
‘Home is fully present in his images, with all a departing son’s conflicting feelings about it. And then home is absent, too, in the paintings made in London; but again, the artist conveys mixed feelings, as he remakes a new dwelling place out of his observations and experiences. In this conjuration of a territory of the imagination... Shanti Panchal communicates an important and very modern message.’
Marina Warner (from catalogue essay for the artist’s 1992 Royal Festival Hall exhibition)‘Shanti Panchal’s unique use of watercolour brings dimensions of western and eastern tradition together in a completely new manner. It is possible to see in his work, for example, in his frozen shadow-less figures with their large open eyes, a transformation of Jain and early Rajput miniatures. It is equally possible to see the connections between his work and the spiritual visions of western mystics such as El Greco and William Blake... ‘Shanti Panchal’s work is not simply a recollection of a lost way of life. It is fiercely contemporary, a commentary on a changing present which is omnipresent. As was the case with the cinematic works of Satyajit Ray - an early influence in his life - the apparently Indian context is universal.’
Professor Deborah Swallow (Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art since 2004, from a catalogue essay for the artist’s 2003 British Council touring exhibition)‘As a child working and playing alongside his parents, Shanti used to make paper boats which he sailed in the irrigation channels they used to cultivate their crops. The boats would, of course, soon become waterlogged and sink and he would make others, the repeated act becoming a powerful metaphor over the years for the intense and ultimately successful struggle he was to make to run away from home (aged 14) and eventually become an independent artist.’
Nicholas Usherwood (writing of Panchal’s monumental painting The Paper Boat in the catalogue for the 2007 exhibition Regard and Ritual at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum, Museum of Art)‘The fusion of worlds in his work is highly individual... Panchal himself effortlessly bridges the two cultures... What makes a Panchal immediately recognisable... is above all the quality of the colour. In it, the brilliant tints of Indian textiles, and even Indian foodstuffs, are reduced to exquisite harmonies, as though the works are somehow illuminated from the inside... his art comes over as deeply humane, a lesson in tranquillity from the artist’s own philosophical calm.’
John Russell Taylor (‘Scenes from a multi-cultural life and times’, The Times, August 1992)‘Shanti Panchal’s quiet yet resonant watercolours are the antithesis of instantaneous art. They compel us to take a long and close regard... Panchal’s subject is the human being rather than merely the human face and form... He depicts isolated figures in communal dramas... ‘[his] terrain is that of his Gujurati childhood and early adulthood, in retrospect poignantly appreciated, celebrated, grieved over. The huge, unsmiling eyes of his figures usually look neither at the spectator or at each other, but beyond the picture frame to some unknown scene, or to the deep layers within.’
Philip Vann (‘Seeing beyond the frame’, RA magazine, 1992, Summer 1992)‘Five years ago I became acquainted with the work of Shanti Panchal, an acquaintance which resulted in the acquisition of his painting ‘Waiting’ for the Indian Collection of the British Museum. Since then my admiration for his work has increased as his artistic vision has further unfolded.’
Richard Blurton, Curator, Department of Asia, British Museum (Foreword, Meghraj Gallery exhibition catalogue, London, 1997)