A journey through life

Swati Rai

An upcoming exhibition in Kolkata is all set to showcase the multiplicity of India’s Renaissance Man Dashrath Patel’s artistic kaleidoscope. A solo show dedicated to the works of the late artist, who was a contemporary of modern masters like Tyeb Mehta, MF Husain, SH Raza and VS Gaitonde, hopes to bring the spotlight back on his vision. He was the founder director of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Born in Nadiad, Gujarat, in 1927, Dashrath Patel passed away on December 1, 2010. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981, followed by the Padma Bhushan, posthumously, in 2011.

Titled School, the exhibition is being put together by Emami Art and has been curated by Pinakin Patel, architect, designer and artist. It presents a wide selection of Dashrath Patel’s line drawings, ceramics, photographs and collages from the 1930s to 2000, tracing his artistic journey across mediums and types. Even though each medium and its imagery were perfectly evolved, he resisted the need to formalise that particular body of work as ‘his style’ and risk being typecast or iconified, says Pinakin.

Despite the breadth of his work, the one form which was a constant was his line drawings. “He would practice every morning and believed this was as crucial as riyaz is for a singer. He described his drawings by saying ‘my line is a dot that goes for a walk,” Pinakin adds.

The exhibition particularly explores Dashrath’s photography, a medium for which he is not that well known.  He started off by interning for Cartier-Bresson. That led him to discover his talent for photography, which did not much interest him initially. Featuring key works from the Dashrath Patel Museum, Alibag, the exhibition opens to public on September 13.