Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads – In and Out of Our Time – Exhibition

Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, 108a Boundary Road, St John’s Wood, London NW8 ORH – Open: 18 September–29 November, Wednesdays to Fridays: 10 am – 5.30 pm. 

This revealing exhibition is part of Ben Uri’s principal focus on researching, digitally documenting, disseminating and celebrating the importance of the Jewish, Refugee, and broad Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900 – see buru.org.uk and diasporaartists.net both resources within benuri.org.

The Ben Uri Research Unit (BURU) is honoured to partner with the Estate of Lancelot Ribeiro to present Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads—In and Out of Our Time, borrowing its title from the artist’s long-planned but unrealised concept for an exhibition. Featuring 20 paintings and drawings, it focuses on Ribeiro’s preoccupation with portraiture and imagined heads from two of the most innovative decades of his practice, the 1960s and the 1990s.

Born into a Catholic Goan family in present-day Mumbai in 1933, Ribeiro followed his older half-brother F N Souza to Britain in 1950, after India’s independence and Partition. After returning to India and becoming an artist, Ribeiro settled permanently in Britain in 1962. Inspired by Indian and Goan architecture and the Christian tradition in which he was raised, he utilised his heads and portraits to explore concepts of power and evil, described by one reviewer as: ‘Colonialists, kings, tyrants, Christ (resurrected), tycoons, women and thugs’ (Bombay Artist Aid Centre review, 1961), among them the monumental Crowned King (c. 1963) and powerful King Lear (1964, Ben Uri Collection). Ribeiro’s experiments with new materials, among them polyvinyl acetate or PVA (a precursor of acrylic paint), sometimes mixed with other nontraditional media, including string, resulting in a set of radical, faceless, abstracted heads, known as the Psychedelic Man series. In his later work, Ribeiro often worked on a large scale, employing brilliant acrylics mixed with elements of collage while disassembling, reimagining and reinvigorating the head in works including the vivid blue Madonna, Rising from the Banks of Main. Yet Ribeiro’s close friend and fellow poet, Indian translator and critic R. Parthasarathy suggests that Ribeiro’s ‘true subject’ was always his ‘origins – Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London’.

A supporting display in the lower galleries features 20 stylistically diverse and innovative paintings, sculptures, and works on paper of heads and portraits from the Ben Uri collection by artists including Frank Auerbach, David Breuer-Weil, Dodo, Alfred Harris, Sarah Lightman, Alfred Lomnitz, Hormazd Narielwalla, Oscar Nemon, Mosheh Oved, Paul Richards, and Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of related talks and events and a fully illustrated online publication with essays by contributors, including the artist’s daughter, Marsha Ribeiro, poet and critic R. Parthasarathy, and conservator Patricia Smithen.