Akash Bhatt
Born in Leicester
Bhatt’s work and process are informed by his sketchbooks and notebooks filled with notes and drawings from observations and drawings of everyday imagery and objects. He draws and paints from direct observation whilst travelling- thereby collecting a dense range of images and ideas to imbue his finalised paintings with a strong sense of place and energy.
His paintings are collage-like, pulling apart and combining the minutiae of urban life: adverts and signs, telephone posts, shop awnings and crowds of people going about their business. It is significant that this process takes up to two years to reach completion, and so his paintings are representative of Bhatt’s meticulous and considered attention to detail in observing and depicting varied fragments of life, culminating in dynamic and densely interwoven panoramic cityscapes and urban scenes.
Catalogue Essay 2017
Madhu, the title of the exhibition, is an abbreviated version of ‘Maduwanti’, the first name of the artist’s mother and the nickname that Akash’s late father would use to refer to her in the family home. Originally from a village in Gujarat, she has been a consistent presence in Akash’s life as a painter, with a role as chief critic, adviser, and crucially, the person most fully aware of the sacrifices necessary to be committed to life as an artist. Now in her eighties, portraits of Madhu have been a regular, if less public part of Akash’s oeuvre over the years. Recently, as the artist puts it, ‘The onset of old age is a constant reminder that time is limited and this in turn pushes me to capture as much of what is available to me.’ One such portrait won the prestigious Sunday Times Watercolour award in 2015, and now in this show she is, as she has always been in his life as a painter, an ubiquitous and stoic presence.
Akash is a constant if not obsessive draughtsman, and has a tendency to hoard even nascent ideas. His journals,besides neat spidery architectural and figure sketches, feature snippets of writing, quotations, passing thoughts, observations, overheard snatches of conversation, plus what to some would be the ephemera of everyday life – labels from food that Madhu has prepared, a fragment from a flyer picked up from a Manhattan Street. All these are plucked from his life and melded and reconstituted in lines and coloured marks on canvas and paper. ‘The characters,the symbols, the notes I use must be infused with my own experience, this is vital as only then can I fully immerse myself in creating a place to paint. Otherwise it is meaningless.’
The longest work, at over 9 feet, is A is for Answer, the third in a trilogy of paintings which have been exhibited over the course of 3 shows, set in Baroda, Gujarat. With its attenuated format and its streets teeming with life, one has the sense of looking into an aquarium. Numerous wheeled vehicles vie for attention; auto-rickshaws, bicycles, cars, carts, mopeds,motorbikes and mobile food stalls. He appears to relish the company of animals in the street-level brouhaha – a donkey is stationed to the left underneath some enigmatic graffiti, and next to the nearby roundabout is a dog loping languorously into the roadway. Snatches of the same yellow, blue, and red tones are interspersed across the panorama on facade, awning and veranda, ushering the eye along the length of the painting under the gaze of the attendant telegraph poles and lamp-posts. Details that extend to the edges and the streets that tail off in new diversions add to the sense of visual and narrative depth.
Dotted line also depicts Baroda and features familiar landmarks. Centre left is the cupola of the Maharaj Fateh Singh museum which houses a significant collection of the work of Ravi Varma – a celebrated 19th century painter. Akash and family have visited the museum but more notable on the opposite side of the road is the domed roof of the Khanderao Market, a favourite haunt of Madhu’s with its vegetable and flower market at the rear of the building. Saturday is a scene from home-town Leicester, a stone’s throw from College street, where Philip Larkin lived in the late 1940s while he was assistant librarian at University College. Victorian terraces are distorted in the windows of the laundrette, and also tail off to the right. The pavement scene is dated and down at heel with its scruffy patchwork shopfront, mosaic tiles, and the grey-mauve biscuit pallor of the plaster walls; yet the artist lightens the mood. ’Speedy Laundry’ appears once as hastily stencilled signage and again as a reflection of its reflection. Seagulls, crows and pigeons look on speculatively, as if on special assignment from the artist. The bins, the birds, the drainpipes, the parking restrictions sign are all classic prosaic Bhatt subtleties and form a lugubrious Larkinesque vista that the artist himself could easily have encountered in 1970s Highfields.
Road Trip recalls a day out with a hospitable cousin in Baroda. In Detour ‘1995’ is scrawled as graffiti on a Manhattan wall, referring to a memory of his father falling ill whilst Akash was in New York painting. Arrival recalls a jet-lagged stayover after a flight from London, evoking a street corner in the Chor Bazaar area of Mumbai. Every painting has the thread of family running through it. And whether it is the grimy overhanging Bombay buildings, the brownstones of New York or brightly coloured facades of Baroda, he masterfully picks out the essential vagaries and familiarities of makeshift, higgledy-piggledy urban architecture, such that we can almost smell the vendors’ various foodstuffs.
Throughout his career, Akash has been celebrated for both portrait as well as architectural work, as his many and diverse prizes and awards attest. Generally a quiet, intelligent and thoughtful man Akash has in this body of work again woven with great skill a complex fabric of ingrained recollection and impression. As he mildly puts it, ‘The older you get the more of this stuff there is’. For me Tennessee Williams sums up what Akash has attempted, and more often than not succeeded in capturing in each of his paintings. ‘Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.’
Aidan Quinn September 2017
Catalogue Essay 2013
‘I rhyme, to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’
Seamus Heaney from Personal Helicon
This new collection of works by Akash Bhatt takes us from the dusty subtropics of Karnataka in South India, via the streets of New York and Bayamo in Cuba, by way of the ancestral headquarters in Gujarat, to, at its heart, the exotic red brick streets of Leicester. Home. The dominant theme is the rippling after-effects of the death of Bhatt’s father Kantilal in the spring of 2011, a subject matter initially evident in his previous show at Beaux Arts in the autumn of that year.
November 2011 saw Bhatt and his family take a trip to India where they scattered the late patriarch’s ashes in the Narmada river in Gujarat before travelling to the south of the country. Having lost my own father recently, I feel some familiarity with the way in which the artist appears to have highlighted fragments and vignettes of memory. When once the subconscious would have glided fleetingly over the momentary thought of a living parent, the conscious mind is brought up short by death, and the merest of recollections – a word, a smell, music – is transporting and is a reminder of the kind of love that underpins one’s existence without ever being stated explicitly. It may be that the strongest and most enduring features of parental love are the thoughts that remain after death. One feels a strong link to particular places and it is as if in the artifice of relating these to memory we hang on to the person who has died and thereby embolden our own sense of self and rootedness, shaken up by the brush with mortality.
Akash’s Gujarati parents came from Kenya at the end of the 60s, to settle in Leicester. Kantilal Bhatt established an insurance business (Amazon International) and was well-known in the Highfields area as ‘Mister Amazon’. Insurance Man is one of the paintings which recall this time and includes the recognisable outline of its eponymous main character. The area now has a large Muslim population, and the black clad figures create a striking contrast with the dramatic blue sky and rust-red brick Victorian buildings. Architecture in Bhatt’s paintings is often at least as significant as any protagonist, the ordinary corner building dramatically and extraordinarily centre stage. A drab modern office block helps to frame the painting on the left, whilst the bin, the yellow lines, the lamp posts, the kerbside puddles all create an atmosphere so vivid that a viewer can almost smell the produce outside the grocer’s on the corner. With the ground colour showing through, however familiar the features of the painting are, they are also in dissolution. Life is short. I Wasn’t There Any More is another Leicester painting, this time in Evington where the insurance man had many clients. The archetypal terraced houses and lamp-posts cascade like dominoes away from the viewer in two directions, framed by urban greenery, and opening up with a dramatic sweep upwards to the right. There are as ever escape routes to ponder on the margins of Bhatt’s streets. The small Lunch-time paintings also recall Evington, particularly those times when Bhatt senior was detailed to bring his son home from school for his mid-day meal, only to leave him briefly stranded in these very vantage points. Fragments recalls sleepy journeys back from a relative’s house, and a struggle to stay awake in the back of the car. Thin Ice is a tribute to the Gujarati women he would see near his father’s office in Leicester, awestruck at their zest for life, and for gossip.
These Leicester paintings are in part a reflection on the affrontery of going back to places that were familiar, but that on revisiting seem to have simply moved on without you, oblivious to your associations. Bhatt also takes us on a journey any first or second generation immigrant will recognise – to the ancestral home. He first went to Baroda 12 years ago and the Gujarati city is the subject of several of the long format street scenes.
Jamun is a painting named after a tonic made from ground jamun (a kind of plum) taken daily by his diabetic father. His supplier in Baroda was situated on a chaotic intersection (Baroda’s ‘Arc de Triomphe’ is how Akash describes it) that makes for an energetic painting, the mélange of cars, buses, bikes, rickshaws a familiar sight to anyone who has visited a subcontinental metropolis. Topiwala (hat maker) is set in the hat and bags market Bhatt got to know well due to his father’s fondness for stylish millenery.
In Pilgrim the view sweeps down from the grand Byzantine Nyay Mandir (Temple of Justice) on the right to Sursagar lake, where a statue of Lord Shiva, trident in hand, looks out over the water. Bhatt fondly remembers drawing here, with his dad as a quiet chaperone. When crowds would gather to watch, Bhatt père would occasionally say simply ‘my son’ from under his hat. The painter I know would appreciate the quiet appreciation. The theme of his father being a worshipper of the god Shiva returns in Kalabhairav, a panoramic long view of a street in Mysore in southern India. Kalabhairav is an incarnation of Shiva, whose sacred mythic vehicle was a dog, statues of which sometimes receive votive offerings of alcohol. Bhatt senior loved this idea of appeasing a god with whiskey, no doubt enhancing his own enjoyment of his favourite tipple. The painting is epic in format and surely contains a record number of two-wheeled conveyances. Bhatt and his father look on together from the right hand side. It is a painting he would have loved. Once again from the urban chaos of a tropical street Bhatt has cleared the dust and pulled out a show-stopper.
Now at the age of 40, the range of accolades he has gained for his work includes the BP Travel prize, the Villiers David Award and the Windsor and Newton Award. He has also been a winner in the Discerning Eye and the Sunday Times watercolour exhibitions. The hunched figures, resilient, dwarfed by architecture, battling, dignified, often alone, are reminiscent of L.S. Lowry. Bhatt in his own way is to modern day Leicester what Lowry was to Pendlebury and Salford. There is an honest, dirty realism that harks back to the Ashcan school of painters and in particular George Bellows’ early twentieth century evocations of New York and New Jersey. His paintings say this is how it is. They do not equivocate. They are the means by which he ‘earths’ and therefore renews himself, bringing together the world around him, his family, and his increasingly important written diaries, small snippets of which are written directly on to the canvas. As Auden put it, ‘The centre that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind’. Standing in his studio amidst the new works- some small, square and jewel-like, others elongated and quietly magnificent in composition and architecture, Bhatt in his unassuming way sums up his oeuvre; ‘I have found a way to talk about my life’.
Aidan Quinn, September 2013
1991–92 Loughborough College of Art – Foundation Studies
1993–96 University of Westminster
1996–98 Central St. Martins School of Art – Postgraduate Diploma
Awards
2015
1st Prize- The Sunday Times Watercolour Artist of the Year Competition
2010
London Lives 1st Prize Network Rail/Cass Arts/Bankside Gallery, London
Penguin Prize, Sunday Times Watercolour Competition
2008
Elected Member of the Royal Society of British Artists
2007
Purchase Prize Discerning Eye Mall Galleries
Winsor & Newton Painting Award RBA Mall Galleries
2005
Regional Award – Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries
2004
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Purchase Prize
2002
The Villiers David Prize
2002
Third Prize, Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition
1999
Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award
BP Portrait Award Finalist, Commended
1997
BP Travel Award
Selected Exhibitions
2020
London Art Fair Islington, Beaux Arts Bath -stand G20
2019
‘Where Light Chases Shadow’ Landscape Exhibition, Beaux Arts Bath
London Art Fair, Islington London with Beaux Arts Bath
2018
‘Artists of Fame and Promise’ Summer Show, Beaux Arts Bath
‘The Sunday Times Watercolour Artist of the Year’ (Shortlisted) – Mall Galleries, London
London Art Fair, Islington London with Beaux Arts Bath
2017
Solo Exhibition ‘Madhu’ – New Paintings, Beaux Arts Bath
‘Artists of Fame and Promise’ Summer Show, Beaux Arts Bath
London Art Fair, Islington London – Beaux Arts Bath
AAF Battersea, London- Beaux Arts Bath
2016
‘Artists of Fame and Promise’ Summer Show, Beaux Arts Bath
London Art Fair, Islington London – Beaux Arts Bath
LAPADA Fair, Mayfair London – Beaux Arts Bath
AAF Battersea, London- Beaux Arts Bath
RBA Mall Galleries, London
2015
Solo Exhibition ‘New Paintings’, Beaux Arts Bath
20/21 British Art Fair, RCA Kensington London- Beaux Arts Bath
London Art Fair, Islington, London- Beaux Arts Bath
2013
Solo Exhibition ‘New Paintings’, Beaux Arts Bath
2012–15
Sunday Times Watercolour Prize, Mall Galleries, London
2011
Solo Exhibition ‘New Paintings’, Beaux Arts Bath
RI Mall Galleries, London
RBA Mall Galleries, London
2010
Solo Exhibition ‘Street Life Drawing’, Beaux Arts Bath
Lynn Painter Stainers, Livery Hall, London
The Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London
RWS/Sunday Times Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London
RBA Mall Galleries, London
2009
Solo Exhibition ‘Just Walk’, Beaux Arts Bath
RWS/Sunday Times Watercolour, Bankside Gallery, London
Threadneedle Prize, Mall Galleries, London
RBA Mall Galleries, London
2008
Lynn Painters & Stainers, Livery Hall, London
RWS/Sunday Times Watercolour, Bankside Gallery, London
Crossing Over, Beaux Arts Bath
RBA Mall Galleries, London
2007
Solo Exhibition – New Paintings, Beaux Arts Bath
The Discerning Eye, Mall. Galleries, London
Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London
2006
Solo Exhibition ‘New Paintings’, Beaux Arts Bath
Solo Exhibition ‘Made in Cuba’, Rebecca Hossack Gallery
The Discerning Eye, Mall. Galleries, London
Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London
2005
Beaux Arts Bath, Summer Show
RBA Mall Galleries, London
Royal Watercolour Society. Annual Exhibition, Bankside, London
The Discerning Eye, Mall. Galleries, London
Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London
2004
The Discerning Eye, Mall. Galleries, London
21st Century Watercolour, Bankside Gallery, London
Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour, Mall Galleries
2003
Solo Exhibition PNG: The Big Payback, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London
Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Mall Galleries, London
The Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London
New English Art Club, Mall Galleries, London
Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London
The Garrick/Milne Prize, Christie’s, London
The Hunting Art Prizes, Royal College of Art, London
2002
New English Art Club, Mall Galleries, London
Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour, Mall Galleries
Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Mall Galleries, London
2001
Solo Exhibition ‘Indi-gestion’, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London
The Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London
New English Art Club, Mall Galleries, London
Royal Society of British Artists, Mall Galleries, London
Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
2000
BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
1999
Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
Map, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London
BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
Contemporary Figurative Art, Beatrice Royal Art Gallery Eastleigh, Hampshire
1998
Solo Exhibition Out of Fiji, BP Travel Award (Touring Exhibition) National Portrait Gallery, London/Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland
BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
Contemporary Figurative Art, Beatrice Royal Art Gallery Eastleigh, Hampshire
1997
Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
1996
Mercury Music Prize Art, London
Singer Friedlander Watercolour Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
1995
Hunting Art Prizes, Royal College of Art, London