Emami Art, recently announced an upcoming solo exhibition School of the great Dashrath Patel to open on September 13, 2018 at its gallery in Kolkata

Curated by Pinakin Patel, the exhibition presents a wide selection of Dashrath Patel’s line drawings, ceramics, photographs and collages from 1930s – 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. His work was his ‘search’ and he actively followed that ideology.

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

The exhibition particularly explores Dashrath’s photography, a medium for which is he not well known.  The story goes that during his show at Galerie Barbizon, Paris, a man (Henri Cartier-Bresson) walked in and having seen his show told Dashrath that he thought he might have a way with photography, and gave him a camera to photograph the streets of Paris for the next two weeks. Two weeks later when Cartier-Bresson placed Dashrath’s photographs next to his, neither could tell the difference.  He started off by interning for Cartier-Bresson which led him to discover his talent for photography which in his earlier days had not been of interest.

Dashrath Patel was a contemporary of modern masters Tyeb Mehta, M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza and V. S. Gaitonde.  In the late 1950s, they all worked together at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial studios in Bombay and early in his career he exhibited alongside them. He was the first Director of Design & Education at the National Institute of Design, (NID Ahmedabad) and was closely associated with the Institute for a period of nineteen formative years. During this period he interacted closely with arts stalwarts such as Charles Eames, Louis Kahn, George Nakashima, Buckminster Fuller, William Hayter, Herbert Matter, Frei Otto, Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Leoni, Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Jaroslav Fric, John Cage, Chandralekha, Gautam Sarabhai, and Gira Sarabhai, among others.

Born in Nadiad, Gujarat in 1927, Dashrath Patel passed away on 1 December 2010. He was awarded the Padma Shri by Government of India in 1981, followed by the Padma Bhushan, posthumously in 2011.

Featuring key works from the Dashrath Patel Museum, Alibag this exhibition opens to the public on September 13, 2018  and will see a number of outreach events for general audiences.