Patel published his first book of poems and held his earliest solo exhibition in Bombay in 1966, which was followed by exhibitions at Kunika Chemould, Delhi in 1972 and Gallery Chemould, Bombay, in 1975. In the 1970s and 80s, he refined an ability to describe the universal experience of isolation in eloquent representations of the urban industrial landscape and common people, sites, and even animals in Bombay. During this period, Patel's artistic practice dovetailed with initiatives of artists based in Baroda and Bombay who responded to contemporary politics and everyday situations with an emphasis on narrative figuration.

While continuing to build on these themes, Patel began a distinct trope of representing violent deaths in the 1980s. In works like Crushed Head (1984) and Battered Man in Landscape (1993), the artist rendered victimized heads and torsos detached from specific aggressors and locational contexts. Like the resilient figures living in his urban-scapes, Patel wounded his victims with empathetic sensitivity and characteristic attention to the contoured shadows and colours at heart of the human form.

In the 1990s, Patel embarked on a long-term series of visual translations drawn from the wells of his ancestral Gujarat. Exhibiting the first of these works in the exhibition Looking into a Well at Gallery Chemould in 1996, Patel's paintings of this subject privilege an expressive, self-conscious recording of the experience of perception. Eliminating the encounter of one's own face that would reflect back from the surface of the water, and transforming the horizontal well into a vertically-hung canvas, the conceptual address of these works ties closely to the artist's persistent attention to the position of the human figure. 

Beth Citron

Text courtesy Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke.