Deepak Shinde
6 Decades of Colourful Crossings
For Deepak Shinde, painting has never been an arrival. It is a way of asking - of meeting the world, and the self, with a question.
Across six decades his art has moved through abstraction, figuration, allegory, and the celebrated coexistence cycle: each a complete language, each relinquished the moment it stopped questioning.
What endures through every change is the search itself - one intelligence, renewing its means of expression again and again.
Sixty years on, the inquiry continues.
The work
Six Decades
Few painters change once. Fewer change and arrive.
Across six decades, Deepak Shinde has done it again and again — each period exploring a different language: a different medium, different subjects, a different way of pursuing his art.
Yet each is unmistakably whole, and unmistakably his.
ABSTRACTION · 1970s
Where the inquiry began — form and colour pursued to their essence.
FIGURATION · 1980s
The gaze turns outward — labour, power, and the human theatre of a changing India.
ALLEGORICAL · 1990s
The gaze turns inward — myth, intimacy, parable.
CO-EXISTENCE · 2000s–2010s
A long meditation on the ancient compact between humans and the natural world.
RECENT WORK · 2020s
A new medium, a new scale. The question renews itself.
Critical voices
On Shinde
“His art has moulted many times. It has pursued different stars and every time it has arrived at a newer self-realization”
“A bacchanalia of colour, held in rein by the spare discipline of an intelligence that is equally at home in an abstractionist and a figurative idiom”
“A consummate colorist, he weaves textures of myriads of colours… the pictorial space becomes chromatically fluid”
Upcoming Exhibition
The Bombay Flora Chronicle
Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai · 13 August – 03 September 2026
- Preview 13th Aug, 2026 · 5–9 pm
- On view until 3rd Sept, 2026
- Curated by Sumesh Sharma