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Lot 87

 

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“I twist and turn, curve and straighten without aim or result. Just an escape, an escapist thing into painting impulsively, compulsively, endlessly, tired, tirelessly with or without joy.” (Lancelot Ribeiro, undated diary entry.)

Lancelot Ribeiro was born in Bombay in 1933 to a Catholic family from Goa. In 1950 Ribeiro’s mother sent her sixteen- year-old son to London to live with his older half-brother, the eminent artist F N Souza,... “I twist and turn, curve and straighten without aim or result. Just an escape, an escapist thing into painting impulsively, compulsively, endlessly, tired, tirelessly with or without joy.” (Lancelot Ribeiro, undated diary entry.)

Lancelot Ribeiro was born in Bombay in 1933 to a Catholic family from Goa. In 1950 Ribeiro’s mother sent her sixteen- year-old son to London to live with his older half-brother, the eminent artist F N Souza, and to study accountancy. However, he soon abandoned his course in order to attend life classes at St Martin’s School of Art from 1951 to 1953. After the completion of his National Service in 1955, Ribeiro returned to Bombay to work with the Life Insurance Corporation and paint in his spare time. In 1958 he began to paint professionally; his first solo exhibition at the Bombay Art Society Salon in 1960 soon sold out, and was followed by five others in Bombay, New Delhi and Calcutta. In 1961 Ribeiro was included in the ‘Ten Indian Painters’ exhibition, which toured extensively in India, Europe, the UK, the US and Canada.

The 1960s brought further recognition for Ribeiro, residing in London from 1962, with a string of both solo and group exhibitions. His paintings of this period began mainly as boldly coloured expressionist townscapes or still life's, but became increasingly semi-abstract, and there was a growing number of paintings and drawings of figures. During this time he also became impatient with the amount of time it took oils to dry, and the lack of brilliance in their colour potential, and so from the mid-1960s Ribeiro began to experiment with Polyvinyl Acetates (PVAs) with varying rates of plasticity. He found that faster drying speeds could be achieved than with traditional oil paints, finished surfaces were more flexible and durable, and previously unavailable colours and exciting new effects had been opened-up to him. After some commercial hesitance, leading artists’ colour manufacturers began to add PVA paints to their ranges.

During the 1970s and 1980s Ribeiro mainly exhibited in group shows, but also had important solo exhibitions at the Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton (1973), Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (1978) and Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery (1986). The restless speed with which he painted was one of the defining characteristics of Ribeiro’s career, and by the time of his death in 2010 he had created a huge body of work. In 2013 Asia House held a major retrospective of his work, entitled ‘Restless Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Britain’, where a number of works from his estate were exhibited to widespread critical acclaim.

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