Physician’s long brush with art

Not many are as fortunate as Gieve Patel to wear so many hats in one lifetime — he trained to be a physician, but he continues to be a poet, playwright and artist.

This exhibition was conceived when the gallery owner, Tunty Chauhan, saw Patel’s works in Neville Tuli’s Osian’s collection. “ Neville was generous in sharing the body of work. We also got a few from seven other private collections,” said Chauhan.

For the unassuming Patel, the retrospective is like a timeline revisited, with little anecdotes coming alive along the way. “ I now look at all these paintings differently and recall things that didn’t seem important or relevant when I was doing them,” he said. “ For instance, stopping by at a painting, I may remember how I had taken time out to play with my daughter for a few minutes and then bargained for peace to work for the next one hour or so.” About his successful brush with so many pursuits, he said, “

Patel has been known for highlighting the poignancy of people caught in adversity.

Some of the work on display is more moving than the rest, like his sculpture of a hand with a broken thumb, titled Eklavya, and the acrylic on canvas, The Letter Home, where a man writes a letter for an illiterate labourer — a statement on the life of workers in a big city with their roots elsewhere.

— Archana