Kapil Jariwala was born in Surat, India in August 1955. He immigrated to England with his family in 1962 arriving via Nigeria. He soon established himself as a curator and art dealer specialising in Oceanic, Indian, Tribal and Contemporary art.
Art dealer, collector, gallerist and independent curator, Kapil Jariwala was born in Surat, India in August 1955. He immigrated to England with his family in 1962, arriving via Nigeria. His sister is the Indian-British painter Caroline Jariwala. When he was 14 years old, he saw an advert for a weekend job in the window of a Twickenham news agent's. The post was for a Saturday gardener for Maria Langlois, an antiques dealer, in whose shop he soon started working as an assistant. Langlois would become a central figure in his life. She nurtured his budding passion for art, antiques and collecting. His formal education started at the Chelsea School of Art, where he obtained a Master’s degree in art history. He later become a lecturer at the same institution, as well as the London College of Printing, while also holding the post of visiting tutor in several art institutions and universities offering arts courses. Throughout his career as lecturer and tutor, he continued to work on his own art and to curate exhibitions. As a curator and dealer, he soon established himself as a specialist in Oceanic, Indian, Tribal and Contemporary art. His Oceanic and Tribal pieces from the 19th and 20th century, come from diverse locations such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Ivory Coast, Mali, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania and Zambia, while the Indian collection encompasses many different periods and styles. Jariwala’s contemporary collection includes the artists: Michael Peter Cain, Charlotte Cain, Charles Hewlings, Gina Medcalf, Sally Musgrove, Cherry Pickles, Geoffrey Rigden and Cherry Pickles, among others.
In 1986, Jariwala opened a gallery based in his own South London home. The enterprise later expanded, relocating to a more prominent location in Hoxton, then to Butler’s Wharf near Tower Bridge in 1990. By 1994, the gallery had made its way to the West End, on New Burlington Street and, in 2000, to West Broadway in New York, where he managed the Culture Gallery. The focus of his galleries has consistently centered on abstract art, which Jariwala sees as the art world’s lingua franca, having the potential to connect diverse cultural and artistic modes of expression. After his four-year stint in New York, he returned to London in 2004 and curated a series of exhibitions in pop-up gallery spaces and other locations. Throughout this period, he showcased a wide range of works within a programme dedicated to modern and contemporary art, punctuated with historically themed shows, presenting Kashmir shawls, tribal and Oceanic armour, early American quilts and even the work of naive Cornish painter, Alfred Wallis, in between displays of contemporary art (Kapil Jariwala website). In 1996 he presented the exhibition and accompanying publication, Rebecca Fortnum: Third Person; Fortnum subsequently became Professor of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art.
His more recent exhibitions are equally diverse and have extended beyond his own space. In 2010, he collaborated with Rosemary Crill of the Victoria and Albert Museum to co-curate The Indian Portrait 1560-1860at the National Portrait Gallery in London. This museum exhibition explored Indian portraiture as a historical record and personal narrative, highlighting the evolution of the art form in Mughal and Rajput courts. The introduction of ‘observed’ portraits, influenced by European realism, allowed artists to capture the psychological depth, humanity, and true likeness of their subjects. More recently, the gallery has concentrated on online exhibitions, including Tribal Art Fair Amsterdam Online, Indian Spring: Love Devotion Surrender and The Covid Mask Show (all 2021); Randal Cooke and David Webb: Paintings in 2022; and Henrietta Smith - Vermeer Variations - Recent Work and Material Witness: a Textiles Exhibition in 2023. In 2022 in his London home-gallery, the exhibition of paintings and works on paper by London-based artist, David Webb, illustrated the artist's journey through abstract art, influenced by themes of fatherhood and identity, and inspired by the landscapes of Cyprus and Byzantine architecture.
Kapil Jariwala lives and works in London and continues to show exhibitions in his Peckham house/gallery and to add to his Indian, Oceanic and Tribal art collection. In the UK public domain, the British Museum holds works previously owned by the Kapil Jariwala Gallery.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Kapil Jariwala]
Publications related to [Kapil Jariwala] in the Ben Uri Library