Exhibition

Shanti Panchal. Ragas Of The Dawn

21 Oct 2016 – 6 Jan 2017

Cost of entry

Free of charge

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Piano Nobile Kings Place

London, United Kingdom

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Travel Information

  • Kings Cross
  • Kings Cross St Pancras
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The 2015 Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize winner returns this autumn with an exhibition of new and existing work.

About

 As the days shorten, Panchal’s monumental watercolours in his trademark earthy tones will bring the vibrancy of his Indian homeland to London’s Piano Nobile Kings Place. Opening on 21 October at Piano Nobile Kings Place Shanti Panchal: Ragas of the Dawn includes a mix of existing and new paintings by award-winning artist Shanti Panchal. Each one is a watercolour on paper and details part of a narrative or autobiographical moment in the painter’s life. His signature ochres, siennas, umbers, violets and greys recall his youth in Mumbai and evoke sand and mud walls, terracotta red roof tiles and vast skies.

Panchal has been artist-in-residence at the British Museum and at the Harris Museum in Preston and won numerous prizes and awards, including the 1991 BP Portrait Award and first prize in the Singer and Friedlander-supported Sunday Times watercolour competition. His work is held in various public collections including the British Museum, Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.  

Renowned for his large-scale, fresco-like watercolours Shanti Panchal is a master of contrasts. At first archaic, his work then reveals itself to be challengingly contemporary. His abstracted works are partly inspired by Indian miniaturist painting plus Buddhist and Jain frescoes, but also by the visionary figuration of El Greco, Rothko's colour fields and Francis Bacon’s backdrops. 

Panchal saturates hand-made paper with these rich, vibrant colours of red, pink, orange and yellow through infusing the paper with many layers of watercolour and scraping back until the surface and colour become one, a meditative and evolving process. The simplicity of Panchal’s work belies the intensity of his working process: his watercolours appear timeless, suspended in quiet moments. And yet, despite this sense of constancy, an enigmatic nostalgia pervades his work, a longing for homelands left and memories past.

 

 

 

 

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Shanti Panchal

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