On View from January 18 through April 27, 2025

Patil’s US Debut Marks Latest Installment in BAMPFA’s MATRIX Series of Contemporary Art

(Berkeley, CA) December 12, 2024—The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will mount the first solo exhibition in the United States of work by Amol K Patil, a celebrated artist whose practice explores issues of class and caste in his native Mumbai. MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance will feature more than twenty paintings and sculptures by Patil, all of which were newly commissioned for the BAMPFA presentation. The exhibition marks the latest installment in BAMPFA’s signature contemporary art exhibition series MATRIX, an experimental platform for artists to make and show new work.

Over the past decade, Patil has established himself as an important voice in India’s contemporary art scene through a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses painting, sculpture, video installation, and live performance. In both abstract and figurative forms, Patil illuminates the experience of marginalized communities in India’s highly stratified urban settings, where poverty and caste discrimination have led to massive levels of inequality. His work often references Mumbai’s chawls, the century-old social housing originally built for mill workers and other laborers, where the city’s working classes have managed to create vibrant shared living spaces against a backdrop of economic precarity.

In Patil’s BAMPFA-commissioned series of painting and sculptures, the chawl is reimagined as a space of historical memory and contemporary resistance, highlighting the resilience of the multigenerational communities who continue to persevere there. Working in the medium of cast bronze sculpture, Patil has crafted a series of five figurative sculptures that obliquely reference the tangled bodies and cramped living conditions of chawl households—where families often live in units as small as 120 square feet. These sculptures will appear alongside a new series of nineteen paintings that expressionistically render everyday life in the chawls, drawing on the personal and communal histories of these sites.

MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance is one of the first major museum presentations for this important artist, who has been gaining increasingly widespread recognition in Asia and Europe—most recently through a two-year residency at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. In 2023, he received his first international solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, which awarded him the inaugural Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation/Kochi-Muziris Biennale (DBF-KMB) Award spotlighting emerging South Asian artists. With his solo exhibition at BAMPFA, Patil joins nearly three hundred artists who have shown their work in the MATRIX series over the past five decades, including Nan Goldin, Alfredo Jaar, Julie Mehretu, Adrian Piper, Martin Puryear, and Cecilia Vicuña, among many others.

“We are thrilled to present this newly commissioned body of work by Amol K Patil for his first US solo exhibition,” said BAMPFA’s Chief Curator Margot Norton, who co-curated Patil’s MATRIX exhibition with Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator. “Patil’s poetic and deeply moving sculptures and paintings bring the everyday experiences of those living in India’s chawls into vibrant relief, depicting intimate moments to reveal urgent societal concerns.”

“Through MATRIX 286, Patil joins a long lineage of artists making ambitious new work at critical points in their careers, including most recently, Gabriel Chaile, Young Joon Kwak, and Sin Wai Kin,” added Sung.  

In conjunction with the exhibition opening, Patil will appear at BAMPFA in conversation with Sung on Saturday, January 18 at 2 PM. The conversation will illuminate Patil’s practice of using art to excavate the lived experiences of Mumbai’s working class. The conversation is free with gallery admission.

About Amol K Patil

Amol K Patil is a conceptual and performance artist based in Mumbai. Following his education in the visual arts from Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts, Mumbai, he has made work that explores the intersection of performance art, theater, music, kinetic art, and video installation. Patil was most recently an artist in residence at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and was the recipient of the inaugural DBF-KMB Award, which culminated with his first institutional solo exhibition in the UK, The Politics of Skin and Movement at Hayward Gallery, London, in 2023. This project was supported by the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation in collaboration with the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

Patil’s grandfather was a noted interpreter and poet, and his father was an avant-garde playwright. Patil, and before him, his family, considers art as a method of resistance. His recent work explores the invisibility of the working class in urban imaginaries and seeks to build counter-memories that describe and disturb the relationship between communities and their environments.

 Patil’s works have been shown at the Gwangju Biennale (2024); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2022); Documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022); Yokohama Triennale (2020); Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Delhi (2019); The Showroom, London (2018); Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2017); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); Dakar Biennale (2016); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); ParaSite, Hong Kong (2014); and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2013).

About BAMPFA

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) ignites cultural change for a more inclusive and artistic world. BAMPFA has been uniquely dedicated to art and film since 1970, with international programming that is locally connected and globally relevant. It holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in its collection, with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art and historical Chinese painting, as well as the world’s largest collection of African American quilts. As part of the University of California, Berkeley, BAMPFA is committed to artistic diversity through its robust slate of art exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, live performances, and educational programs that shed new light on the art of the past and connect our audiences with leading filmmakers and artists of our time. BAMPFA sits on the edge of campus and downtown Berkeley, where it welcomes visitors from across and beyond the Bay Area in a repurposed building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Exhibition Credits

MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance is curated by Margot Norton, Chief Curator, and Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator.

The exhibition is part of BAMPFA’s ongoing MATRIX series of contemporary art exhibitions. Founded in 1978, MATRIX provides artists with an experimental platform to make and show new work. 

The MATRIX program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis. Additional support for MATRIX 286 is provided by Project 88, Mumbai.