Masters at Dubai art fair

Celebrated muralist and printmaker Padma Shri Shanti Dave's works of art are being displayed at Art Dubai 2019. To unwind the monumental spendour of mid-twentieth century India, through Dave’s work, DAG will take the naturalist’s works while portraying his compass as a free-thinking painter.

Shanti Dave’s abstracts resemble the familiar and the known. There are writings, figures, deities, forms, and shapes that resonate with what we seem to know. If the language is indecipherable, perhaps it belongs to some ancient texts lost to history, which would well depict his ode to a civilization that existed in the past, or a prophesy of one to come. Born in 1932, in Ahmedabad, Shanti Dave studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, one of the nation’s best workmanship schools, before moving to New Delhi where he started to try different things with encaustic, broadening from allegorical craftsmanship looking for a theoretical articulation. Consolidating calligraphy with ideas of the acclimated, he had the capacity to touch base at another dialect rich with pieces of information yet without a complete setting or importance. His works from the 1970s have a range and assorted variety that is a festival of the intense endeavor to split far from the ordinary. A commended muralist and printmaker, Dave’s paintings are part of a planned retrospective on this talented artist that go a long way towards unraveling the explorations in the abstract vernacular in the mid-twentieth century India.