The Artist
Deepak Shinde was born in 1946 in Yavatmal, in the Vidarbha region of rural India — where the land stretches wide and the seasons write upon it.
Before he knew art, he knew looking.
Origins
Beginnings
Shinde grew up in a large farming household. Fields and forests, animals and weather, the village and its many lives — he watched how everything lived alongside everything else. The land entered his eye early, and never left it; so did the quiet fact of coexistence, long before it became the word for his art.
The pictures began wherever pictures could be found: calendar art, film magazines, landscapes painted in the forest as a schoolboy. By his teens he had made himself a studio inside the family house. The decision had already been made, quietly, and by him alone: he would be an artist.
His heart was set on the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai). Against all odds, his father's wishes, and despite being a B.Com graduate with Honours from Nagpur University, he didn't let his conviction fade. In the late 1960s, he arrived in Bombay. He would later call it the biggest happening of his life.
J.J. School of Art
The Formation
Five years at the J.J. School of Art formed the painter. He ranked first through all of them; his professors opened the Bombay art world to him, and the masters of the generation above — Gaitonde, Padamsee, Sabavala, Tyeb, Bendre, Hebbar — became his early company, mentors, and friends.
One counsel outlasted every other. V.S. Gaitonde — friend, philosopher, and guide across decades — told the young Shinde: do not bind yourself to a single style.
Six decades
The Journey
Firsts
The firsts came early.
A first group show at the Governor's Palace, Bombay, in 1971, while still a student. A first painting acquired in 1972 by the theatre legend Pandit Satyadev Dubey. A first solo exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in 1973 — from which N.S. Bendre selected a painting for the National Gallery of Modern Art.
He was twenty-six. The life he had imagined in Yavatmal was underway.
The Crossings
Six decades of work followed — and six decades of change.
Abstraction in the seventies. Figuration in the eighties: labour, power, the human theatre of a changing India. The inward turn of the nineties: myth, intimacy, parable. The long meditation of the Coexistence cycle — the ancient compact between humans and the natural world, first watched by a boy in Vidarbha.
And now, in his ninth decade, a new medium and a new scale: the newest crossing of them all.
What he saw, what he asked, and why each body of work took the form it did — that story is told in The Practice.
The Studio, Today
Deepak Shinde lives and works in Mumbai. He also has studios at Chitrakutir Kalagram at Pen in Maharashtra as well as a quite abode to practice in the quaint village of Zalor in South Goa.
He paints daily, as he has for over fifty years. The inquiry continues.
Ledger
The Record
- Collections & Acquisitions
- National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi — acquired from the artist's first solo exhibition, 1973
- Private and corporate collections in India and internationally
- Biennales
- Tokyo Biennale, 1984
- Havana Biennale, 1986
- Fifth Beijing Biennale, 2012
- First Indo-Korean Biennale, Mumbai, 2018
- Positions
- Commissioner, 10th Triennale India, 2001
- Jury, National Exhibition, Lalit Kala Akademi, 2006
- Jury, Bombay Art Society, 2007
- Jury, Maharashtra State Art Exhibition, 2000
- Auctions
- Sotheby's, London — Modern and Contemporary Indian Art: 100 Years, 1996
- Christie's, London — Indian Contemporary Art, 1997
- Saffronart, 2000
- Recognition
- Career Achievement Award, Directorate of Art, Maharashtra State, 2016
- Exhibitions
- Over twenty-five solo exhibitions since 1973 — Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Varanasi, Kathmandu, Dubai, Sydney
- Over fifty group exhibitions in India and internationally