Born: 1940 Dalla, Punjab, British India (now India)
Year of Migration to the UK: 1974
Other name/s: Avtarjeet Dhanjal
Biography
Sculptor and multi-media artist, Avtarjeet Singh Dhanjal was born into a crafts-oriented peasant family in Dalla, Punjab, British India (now India) on 4 October 1940. After working as a carpenter, blacksmith and sign-writer, he studied at the Government College of Arts, Chandigarh between 1965 and 1970, then moved to East Africa, where he taught sculpture at Kenyatta University College in Nairobi, Kenya for two years (Buckman, 2006). In 1974, Dhanjal relocated to London, England to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art. However, Dhanjal left Saint Martin’s after a year, having been noticed by the Alcan Aluminium Company who sponsored his one-year project at one of their fabrication works at Tipton in the Midlands, where he rolled several tons of aluminium plate into spirals, using its flexibility and wind to induce perpetual movement in his pieces (VADS). One of the resulting works, Grown in the Field, was commissioned and presented to the University of Warwick by Alcan Aluminium in 1977. The artist commented that the five individual coils of the sculpture were different sizes to symbolise the various stages of growth of a tree: ‘My work is very much nearer nature and has life like a tree or plant. My pieces respond to atmosphere like natural vegetation [...] They grow under the sun, breathe open air, swing like trees and vibrate like leaves’ (Art UK). The work he produced during the project was also shown at Dudley Castle in 1975 (Buckman, 2006). In 1978, Dhanjal organised a Punjabi folk culture study trip, and in 1980 a sculpture symposium in Punjab. This resulted in a sculpture commission, an abstract work in stone and metal exploring the ground plan of an Indian temple, a re-occurring theme in later works. Other public commissions using abstract forms and drawing on nature followed, notably at the National Garden Festival, Stoke on Trent (1986), Wolverhampton (1986) and Birmingham (1989) (Donnell, 2002).
Alongside public commissions, Dhanjal was also involved in many London exhibitions over the next two decades. In 1982, he was included in Between Two Cultures: An Exhibition by Contemporary Indian Artists in the UK, held at the Barbican Centre. He later held a solo show in 1987 at London’s Horizon Gallery, founded by the Indian Arts Council the same year. Participating in the wider Black and Asian art scene in England, his work featured in exhibitions organised by the Karachi conceptual artist and curator, Rasheed Araeen. First, in 1986 he was included in Third World Within at Brixton Art Gallery, featuring Saleem Arif, Uzo Egonu, Mona Hatoum, Gavin Jantjes, Keith Piper and Kumiko Shumuzu. The exhibition was described as bringing together ‘the work of AfroAsian Artists in Britain’, as Araeen preferred this term over ‘Black’ (Chambers, 2014). Two years later, Dhanjal was included in Araeen’s more monumental exhibition at Hayward Gallery, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (1989–90), which ‘featured a broad range of artists from different ethnic backgrounds (excluding white) whose practices ranged from the explicitly political through to the esoteric, from the highly figurative to the abstract and formalist’. Some of the other artists had been included in Third World Within, while others were new additions to the cohort, such as Eddie Chambers, Lubaina Himid, Ronald Moody, and Li Yuan-Chia. ‘For the first time’, Chambers has since reflected, ‘a sort of history book of Black-British artists was brought into existence, thereby emphatically challenging the exclusion of Black artists from all manner of narratives of British art history of the twentieth century’ (Chambers, 2014).
At the beginning of the 1990s, Dhanjal went to south India to study temple sculpture and, in 1991, began a complex commission for the Cardiff Bay Development Trust, a sculptural interpretation of The I Ching [Book of Changes]. In 1997 his work was displayed in the Transcultural Gallery space at Cartwright Hall, Bradford, a semi-permanent display consisting of contemporary and historical art relating to the Indo-Pakistan Sub-Continent (Hylton, 1997). The same year he held a major retrospective exhibition at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, west London, accompanied by a monograph by Brian McAvera, published by the Institute of International Visual Artists (INIVA) who had organised the show. The exhibition included abstract works made since the 1980s in slate, a material that Dhanjal finds evocative of the depth of darkness of the night in rural Punjab (Donnell, 2002).
Avtarjeet Singh Dhanjal lives and works in Shropshire, where he has supported the visual arts and encourages cultural links between Asia and Britain. He established the Punjabi Institute exchange programme for students and teachers in Punjab and Shropshire, and has been a trustee of the South Asian Visual Arts Festival, Sampad, and a member of the West Midlands Arts Council (Donnell, 2002). His works are held by UK public collections including the University of Warwick and Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford.
Related books
- Eddie Chambers, Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 6, 49
- Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Light Over the Horizon: Journey of an Artist (Helsinki: European Union Migrant Artists Netowrk, 2012)
- David Buckman, Artists in Britain Since 1945 (Bristol: Art Dictionaries, 2006), p. 412
- David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce eds., Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005)
- Alison Donnell ed., Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 93-95
- Brian McAvera, Avtarjeet Dhanjal (London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1997)
- Richard Hylton, 'Exhibitions: Reviews: Transcultural Gallery', Art Monthly, No. 211, 1997, p. 24
- Rasheed Araeen, Guy Brett, Avinash Chandra, David Coxhead, Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Susan Hiller, Balraj Khanna, Tim Scott, and Caroline Tisdall, 'Does India Have No Present?', Art Monthly, No. 40, Novermber 1980, p. 22
Related organisations
- Government College of Arts, Chandigarh (student)
- Kenyatta University College, Nairobi (tutor)
- Punjabi Institute exchange programme (Founder)
- Saint Martin's School of Art (Student)
- West Midlands Arts Council (Member)
Related web links
- India Today, 'Horizon Gallery in Central London Aims to Show Best of Contemporary Arts', 1987
- Iniva: Avtarjeet Dhanjal Exhibition at the Pitshanger Manor and Gallery, 1997
- Power of Silence: Photographs & Drawings by Avtarjeet Singh Dhanjal, Diversity Gallery, 2015
- Recordings: A Select Bibliography of Contemporary African, Afro-Caribbean and Asian British-Art
- University of Warwick profile
- VADS: Between Two Cultures, Barbican Arts Centre 1982, exhibition information pack
Selected exhibitions
- Power of Silence: Photographs & Drawings by Avtarjeet Singh Dhanjal, Diversity Gallery at Butetown History & Arts Centre, Cardiff Bay (2015)
- Avtarjeet Dhanjal and Eugene Palmer: New and Recent Work, 4 Victoria Street, Bristol (2002)
- Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (1997)
- Transcultural Gallery display, Cartwright Hall, Bradford (1997)
- The Other Story, Hayward Gallery, London and tour (1989-1990)
- Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Horizon Gallery, London (1987)
- Third World Within, Brixton Art Gallery, London (1986)
- Between Two Cultures: An Exhibition by Contemporary Indian Artists in the UK, Barbican Arts Centre, London (1982)
- Dudley Castle, Dudley (1975)
