Camden New Journal - Features: Regard and Ritual

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The Review - FEATURE
Published: 24 May 2007

Hazel and Ash by Shanti Panchal

Colourful insight on the mundane

THE shared immigrant experience of both Hindus and Jews is being explored in a new exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery in St John’s Wood.
Regard and Ritual features the work of first-generation Indian artist Shanti Panchal, who came to England from Gujarat in the late 1970s on a British Council scholarship, alongside paintings by Julie Held, a second-generation Jew whose father escaped from Nazi Germany.
There are some 20 works by each artist, ranging in size from intimate sketches to large-scale canvases. Both are deeply rooted in a traditional respect for artists’ materials and a
humanist approach, and both share a love of colour and simple composition.
Rachel Dickson, who co-curated the show with Julia Weiner, says: “The scale of Shanti’s watercolours is particularly striking. They are executed in an unusually large scale for this medium with the degree of saturation of paper with paint suggesting, misleadingly, the use of pigment or pastel. Julie explores her themes in pen and ink, pencil, gouache and oil – returning to the same subjects repeatedly but exploring through differences in scale and both colour and monochrome.
“Their imagery shares an interest in the seemingly mundane tasks and objects that shape our everyday lives.”

* Regard and Ritual – Julie Held and Shanti Panchal is at the Ben Uri Gallery, London Jewish Museum of Art,
108a Boundary Road, NW8.
Until June 3.
Tel 020 7604 3991

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