Gieve’s new genre

With his recent exhibition of sculptures and drawings titled Daphne/Eklavya, Gieve Patel has, for the first time ventured into the field of sculpture, culminating in a suite of terracotta, bronze and fiberglass figures, as per a report in Hindustan Times of March 9, 2007. Essaying roles as varied as artist, poet, playwright and physician, Patel has engaged with the visual arts for the past four decades. The 67-year-old admits that he has more time to explore his artistic sensibilities since he retired from medical practice a year ago. "Over the years I have contemplated sculpture but the logistics defeated me. It was too complicated to even think about it. So when Shalini Sawhney of The Guild Art Gallery offered me the opportunity, and most importantly the infrastructure, I agreed right away.”

Gieve Patel: experimenting with folklore and figures

Patel was given access to the Sukruti foundry in Jaipur, where he worked for two-and-a-half weeks on his three dimensional articulations. Daphne, a figure from Greco-Roman mythology and Eklavya from the Ma­ha­­bharata were the two principal protagonists in the recent exhibition where the artist displayed a body of work marked with a sense of dislocation. Patel’s sculptures embody lust as found in the myth of Daphne and vicious oppression as witnessed in the Eklavya episode. "The two myths have been with me for many years now,” the artist explains. "In certain deep subterranean ways, they are meaningful but often one finds it difficult to put a finger on what exactly fascinates the mind.”