“In the village where I lived, there was no electricity, Dark nights became pitch black. The darkness became solid… In the village, any light burning becomes magical.”
At Frieze Masters 2025, Grosvenor Gallery will present a solo exhibition of work by the British-Indian sculptor and multimedia artist Avtarjeet Dhanjal (1940-2025).
A major concern of Dhanjal's work was to explore the tensions between industrial materials and processes and those of the natural world. These materials and processes have a wider, metaphorical resonance and also address tensions in culture and history, in part derived from his own experience of India and Britain.
We will be showing Dhanjal's slate and fire sculptures that were exhibited in the seminal 1989 exhibition 'The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in post-war Britain', curated by Rasheed Araeen, and staged to challenge the Eurocentric narrative of modernism and post-war British art by highlighting the works of suppressed African, Asian, and Caribbean artists living in Britain.
The sculptures are large blocks of slate into which Dhanjal cut sequences of small niches to hold candles, the colour of the stone referencing the endless darkness of night in the small, rural village in which he grew up.
The darkness of the slate is reconciled with the light; polarities are brought together and shades and textures revealed. By using candles in this way, Dhanjal confers upon the works a functional identity that is integral to Indian devotional sculpture. These works, more than any produced in his career, express his cultural presence, combining his practice as a sculptor in the west and his affinity with Indian culture, its philosophy and artistic traditions.
"You could say that they are abstracted constellations in the night sky, but they are equally mandalas, pictograms or maps of the universe of the gods."
Brian MacAvera, 1997
