Lancelot Ribeiro in the 1960s. Image courtesy of the Artist’s Estate.
Aicon is proud to present Requiem, the first solo exhibition of the Indian Expressionist painter, Lanceloté José Belarmino Ribeiro (1933–2010) in New York. The exhibition presents a selection of works drawn from Ribeiro’s six-decade career, with the earliest from 1962 the year of his leaving India for a new life in London to the latest in 2004. Requiem is presented in collaboration with 108 Art Projects India.
Ribeiro was born in Bombay to a Roman Catholic family from Goa. F.N. Souza was his older half-brother and the two, from childhood, would remain close. Ribeiro would witness his brother’s career emerge and the formation of the Progressive Artists’ Group whose members were welcomed into the family home.
He was schooled at St. Xavier’s in Mumbai in the 1940s, but it was the troubled experience of two years boarding at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Rajasthan, run by Irish Christian Brothers which, he described, set his “beginning as an image maker.”
He first traveled to Britain in 1950, aged sixteen, following Souza who had left in 1949. He had been sent to study accountancy and on arrival stayed with his brother and his wife Maria, and their daughter Shelley, recalling their “lives and contacts were an ‘open book’ intertwined at Chalcot Square. This was so even when I left to live on my own.”
Soon abandoning accountancy, Ribeiro’s creative interests started to emerge. He studied life drawing at St. Martin’s School of Art, explored jewelry design and was writing poetry. However, conscription intervened and he was placed in the Royal Air Force. Securing compassionate leave in 1955, Ribeiro returned to India to work in life insurance. His move into painting was accidental when he was invited out hunting: “At the hardware store I saw some paint colors. I was amazed. Instead of buying ammunition I bought a load of these colors.”
His first paintings date from 1958 and were mainly expressionistic oil townscapes influenced by the Goan landscape and, he explained in 1972, “the other and perhaps the strongest influence were the paintings of my brother 10 years senior.” His archetypal heads often depicted Christ, monks, bishops, or saints.
It was his first sell-out exhibition at the Bombay Artist Aid Center in 1961, inaugurated by Rudi von Leyden, which cemented his fate as a painter. A month before opening, he had won the support of Dr. Homi Bhabha the renowned nuclear physicist who acquired several pieces for himself and the Tata Group. He was commissioned from Tata Industries to paint Urban Landscape, a mural for the new offices of Tata Iron and Steel through their Chairman and Chief Executive, J.R.D. Tata.
By end-1962, Ribeiro had had ten exhibitions, including Ten Indian Painters which toured extensively across India, US, Canada, and Europe. He decided to settle permanently in Britain in 1962 and over coming years would continue to exhibit at influential venues in London, Paris, and the US. It was around this time; he would work unofficially as Souza’s studio assistant in Belsize Park.
In the early part of the decade, Ribeiro, ever-inquisitive, began his pioneering experimentation with polyvinyl acetate (PVA), becoming “a godfather to generations of artists using acrylics as an alternative to oils.” (The Times, 2011). This triggered a marked shift in style as he created fluid and lyrical pieces, evident in Woman with Ruby Pendant (1968). His work, from then on, remained innately experimental in medium, subject, style, and form, reflecting a lifelong
artistic philosophy: “I could go on endlessly to produce painting after painting— interesting perhaps— but somewhat meaningless and self-plagiarizing.”
In 1963, Ribeiro co-founded the transformative Indian Painters Collective (IPC), which held Six Indian Painters at India House (1964). Twenty-five years later, the IPC evolved into the Indian Artists UK (IAUK), a movement which advocated for artists from the subcontinent. He was also lecturing on his artistic practice and Indian art and culture for the Commonwealth Institute.
Over his career, Ribeiro held nearly 70 solo and group exhibitions across India, UK, Paris, Germany, Chicago, and San Francisco. He participated in exhibitions alongside his brother, which included The Arts of India at the Towner Art Gallery (1966) and Five Indian Artists (1976) organized by Maria Souza’s ARTS 38. His last major solo exhibition was a retrospective at Leicester’s Museum & Art Gallery (1986), which showcased his work from 1960–1986. He would return to India for one last exhibition in 1998, 30 years after he had left.
The two brothers continued to remain close even after Souza had left for New York in 1967. After his brother’s death, Ribeiro reflected to their sister, Marina, “I miss Sonnie very much— despite our usual fights and arguments … my attitude to him was sheer ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’. I feel sure he felt the same towards me.”
Requiem at Aicon brings together several pieces the artist exhibited when he returned to Goa in 1969 and includes previously unseen erotic works. On display at the first appearance of Ribeiro’s work in New York, there is a townscape dedicated to Dr. Homi Bhabha and Stricken Monk (1968) which featured in Art in America’s 1969 London Galleries review:
... if you have further time to spare in London, and you really want to delve into its present art, visit some studios. This becomes necessary because much of the best work now being done in these parts is not at the galleries ... take the case of Lancelot Ribeiro, a gentle and retiring man who stays away from the art whirl to compose the most horrendous faceless icons in his Belsize Park studio. The mighty masochism of Ribeiro’s Stricken Monk with Cat-O’-Nine-Tails turned my mind away to the war in Vietnam. However, Ribeiro showed the piece in his native Goa recently, and there it seemed a reflection of India’s lacerated land.
Right: Page 93 from Art in America, 1969.
Lancelot Ribeiro in 1961 standing in front of Urban Landscape, a 12-foot mural painted for the office of J. R. D. Tata, chairman of Tata & Sons (Mumbai), the largest industrial group in India. Image courtesy of the Artist’s Estate.
REMEMBERING LANCE RIBEIRO
I first met Lance in Bombay (now Mumbai) at a poetry reading at the British Council on Homji Street in 1955 when I was an undergrad at Bombay University, and Lance worked as an agent for the Life Insurance Corporation of India. Lance had recently returned from London, where he had studied life of drawing as a part-time student for two years, from 1951 to 1953, at St. Martin’s School of Art. From 1955 to 1960, we would meet on Saturday afternoons at Hira Building, the home of his parents, João and Lilia Riberio, across the street from Crawford Market in downtown Bombay. The Sir J.J. School of Art, where Lance’s halfbrother Sonnie (the painter Francis Newton Souza) had studied in the early 1940s before being expelled in 1945 for participating in the Quit India movement, was close by. Rudyard Kipling was born on the school campus where his father Lockwood Kipling was professor of architectural sculpture in the mid-1860s. The traffic near Crawford Market was, I remember, horrendous. Street noises would travel three stories up to the living room where we talked, often joined in by Lance’s sister Marina, who was a flight attendant with Air India.
Lance and I would read each other’s poems aloud and talk about them for hours. He was a good judge of poetry with an unerring instinct for finer nuances of language. Both of us were in our early twenties and hoped to be published poets someday (a feat I achieved in 1977 with the publication of Rough Passage). However, in 1959, Lance abandoned poetry for painting. I record this event in the poem Portrait of a Friend as an Artist, which appeared ten years later in London Magazine, edited by the poet Alan Ross.
He too was a poet till he gave up, one day, blowing rings of poems. Now paintings are his cup of tea, often laced with thin sugar of Goan
memories: churches with inoffensive bells in their loins, shoulders Lopped off, epaulettes and all, Stone-blind in the eyes, and strutting
crosses on every hill (skulls, or whatever remains, of Catholic Europe) that stare at you all over. From Belsize Park he writes tenderly
of the brown weekends of our youth in Bombay. Arrogance was second nature to him, something we shared in common. And a love of words.
I learned from Lance’s daughter Marsha that Lance treasured this poem. P. L. Brent had included the poem in his anthology, Young Commonwealth Poets ‘65, and I had sent Lance a copy of the book. Marsha tells me that Lance “would carry the book . . . and very quietly, unassumingly and touchingly show it [the poem] to friends, especially in the last years of his life.”
Early in his career as a painter, Lance had been very much under the influence of Souza (1924-2002), who had already established himself as the leading Indian
painter of his generation, that included K. H. Ara (1914-1985), M. F. Husain (19152011), S. H. Raza (b. 1922), Mohan Samant (1924-2004), and Tyeb Mehta (19252009). In 1947, Souza and Raza had formed the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay. They had turned away from the nationalist art of the Bengal school in favor of European modernism, thus laying the foundation of modern art in postindependence India. In this they were mentored by a trio of European Jewish émigrés, Rudolf von Leyden, Walter Langhammer, and Emmanuel Schlesinger, who had arrived in Bombay to escape the Holocaust. Later, von Leyden and Schlesinger began to collect Lance’s work. Before long Lance would break away from Souza’s influence and establish himself on his own. But Goa remained the one subject that continued to inform the work of the two brothers.
It was around 1959, on Calangute Beach, Goa, that Lance met his future wife Ana Rita Pinto Correia. Six months later, on May 21, 1960, they were married in Woodhouse Church, Colaba, Bombay. Ana Rita’s family was part of the GoanPortuguese élite. Gentle, soft-spoken, and self-effacing, Ana Rita provided the anchor that Lance badly needed. He couldn’t have chosen a better life partner.
Lance invested the Goan landscape with the resonance of a metaphor. To understand the source of his inspiration, I decided to travel to Goa. I arrived in Panjim (now Panaji) by boat in the summer of 1960. All along the River Mandovi, white-washed bungalows with imbricated tiles nested in groves of palm trees. Churches rose in prayer from every hilltop. Lance was there waiting for me at the pier. We boarded a rickety bus (carreira) and set off for Lance’s village of Azossim in Ilhas’ (now Tiswadi) taluka (subdivision of a district) where his mother cooked us a traditional Goan meal, comprising grilled fish, prawn balchão, and bebinca.
I saw Goa through Lance’s eyes and was overwhelmed by the blend of Portuguese and Indian cultures. Goa had after all been the crown jewel of Portuguese imperial possessions for four hundred and fifty years. It is here, in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, that the embalmed body of St. Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the Indies and patron saint of Goa, rests undisturbed. It was here that Luís Vaz de Camões became a great poet, having spent six years (1561-1567) as a common soldier. Old Goa was a bit of medieval Europe transplanted onto Indian soil. Portuguese rule
Lancelot Ribeiro in Belsize Park, 1968. Image courtesy of the Artist’s Estate.
permanently affected the Goan way of life. As a result, the Goan sensibility is unlike that of any other India. One of the recurring topics of Lance’s conversations with me over the years was that we travel to Portugal and experience for ourselves the Iberian elements in Goan culture; but we never made it to Portugal. I gather from Marsha that Lance did visit Portugal on his own sometime later.
I remember the excitement that surrounded Lance’s first one-man show at the Bombay Artist Aid Centre in April 1961. The exhibition was an instant success and was followed by a commission from Tata Iron and Steel to paint a twelve-foot mural. Among Lance’s patrons at this time were the nuclear physicist and painter Homi J. Bhabha and the art critic of the Times of India, Rudolf von Leyden, who wrote of a later show: “Lance Riberio has a fine sense and quality of color. His pictures have an impressive strength and great emotional power. He is a painter to be understood and studied.”
In April 1962, about two months before Lance moved to London (Ana Rita and their one-year-old daughter Raissa followed in December), the American poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Peter Orlosvsky were in Bombay. After their reading on the terrace of theatre director Ehbrahim Alkzai’s house on Warden Road, Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Lance, and I, together with the American poets, walked down to Ezekiel’s apartment at 67 Breach Candy. When we got there, Ginsberg wanted to know what Indian poets were like. At his request Ezekiel, Jussawalla, Lance, and I read our poems. Lance hadn’t, after all, given up poetry. He himself says so in a letter written thirty-two years later (November 13, 1994): “I paint without the slightest worry; never a sense of doubt. Why do I feel so inadequate putting words to paper? . . . and yet such a need to do it. Perhaps words give more away. Maybe it’s the reason most of my writing is incomplete.”
After Lance and Ana Rita’s move to London, we met only occasionally. But Lance always kept in touch through letters. In September 1963, I caught up with him in his Priory Road, West Hampstead apartment on my way to Leeds University in the north of England for graduate studies. The next time I saw Lance was in January of 1979 on my way home to New Delhi from a writer’s residency at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in the US. Lance and Ana Rita had separated by then, and Lance had moved out of the Belsize Park Gardens apartment to Egbert Street in Chalk Farm. I stayed with Lance, and we often went for long walks on Hampstead Health. The last time Lance and I met was in August 1997 on my way back from Leiden to the US, where I had moved in 1982. We spent an entire day together, beginning with a long lazy lunch at the Brasserie Chez Gérard near his home and rounding off the evening with a visit to the Old Vic to see a production of Cheklov’s The Seagull in Tom Stoppard’s version.
Lance had been living for almost twenty years in a one-bedroom apartment at 214 Haverstock Hill in Hampstead, north-west London—home to such celebrities as Geroge Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Yehudi Menuhin, Walter Gropius, Henry Moore, and Lucian Freud. There were paintings and scraps of writing everywhere, including the bathroom. Water leaking through the roof had left its mark on many of them. Unfinished paintings littered the bed and floor. The paintings seemed to have taken over the apartment, displacing their creator. It was an unhappy state of affairs. Lance himself offered an explanation in a letter (November 29, 2004) to me: “I was too scared by a stormy childhood that had successfully messed me up—a basket case masked with constantly changing façades and rarely knowing which one I had on. I lacked the capacity to handle the simplest aspects of life’s generalities, never mind its complex issues and certainties. Unfortunately, not much has changed.” He kept himself aloof from the politics of the London art
scene and withdrew into his own world more and more. He began to exhibit regularly in Germany, which he found to be more receptive to his work. Fortunately, in July 2010, Marsha relocated Lance’s paintings to a storage facility that also doubled as his art studio.
For someone with so prodigious talent, Lance was philosophical about the values of his work. Commercial galleries rarely exhibited his work: his paintings did not sell. However, private buyers often visited him. Lance accepted the situation. He knew he was not in fashion. He told me once that a dear friend of his, the influential art critic Bettina Wadia, née Wadlová, had taken him to task for his reluctance to promote himself: “Do you know how many artists contact me in the most abject and despicable way every single day? And here you are, with me trying my damnedest, and you don’t even respond.” That was Lance. He wasn’t the sort of person who would draw attention to himself or go out of his way to push his own work. He kept to himself. In more than half a century that I had known him, I had always found him to be passionate about ideas. This was often the case when Souza was around in Bombay in the early 1960s. The two brothers had strong opinions about themselves, often bordering on arrogance, but they never talked about them. Not once had I seen Lance lose his composure in my presence. One of Lance’s enduring achievements was that he helped to develop PVA acrylic paint and pioneered its use by his own example. Acrylics brightened up the coloring and gave his paintings an enamel finish.
A certain nostalgia, best expressed by the Portuguese word saudade, for Goa permeates all of Lance’s work. Lance would have endorsed with a chuckle Souza’s boast to the Goan writer Vivek Menezes when the latter had visited him in his New York apartment: “I’ve swallowed Goa whole; I’ve digested it all. You can see it reproduced all around you.” Lance too had “swallowed Goa whole” and had “digested it all.” As a Goan, Lance was inordinately proud of his heritage. The spectacular Goan landscape, the white-washed churches that raised their fullthroated spires in every village, and the fabulous wooden icons inside them—all turned into memorable images in Lance’s work; they continue to haunt me to this day. Loss of homeland and residence in England had only sharpened Lance’s vision of Goa. It had made him see and hear the immemorial rhythms of everyday Goan life with precision and clarity. His paintings capture this vision in sharp abstract images that tumble onto the canvases like a waterfall. They explode with colors that recreate, in the heart of London, the harsh brilliance of a tropical world that Lance had left behind almost fifty years ago. “One must wait until the evening,” wrote Sophocles, “to see how splendid the day has been.” And without a doubt, Lance’s day had been extraordinarily splendid.
However, the true subject of Lance’s paintings is, I believe, origins—Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London. How does a human being come to terms with multiple histories and in the process achieve wholeness? Both Lance and I grew up under the Raj that left an indelible mark on us. Lance was critical of both the Raj and the Estado da Índia (the Portuguese state in India that lasted 450 years, ending only in 1961). His criticism of both was subtle, not abrasive. It is there as a subtext in many of his works. Lance’s paintings are intricate networks of color that attempt to establish connections that reach out for something tangible outside of himself. They are floating histories of the man and of his and our predicament.
Lance’s voice will always remain with me. It was deep-throated and sensuous. He could have been a singer had he wished to. When he talked, you listened. He spoke with authority on a wide range of subjects. But Goa remained the epicenter
of his consciousness. “He was a painting,” Marsha wrote me in an email, “until the very last.”
Lance died at home at 214 Haverstock Hill, on Christmas Day, 2010 at the age of seventy-seven and was cremated on January 11, 2011 to the strains of Psalm 23 and Henry Francis Lyte’s moving hymn, “Abide with me,” at the Golders Green Crematorium, off Finchley Road, not far from where he had lived as a pordexi Goenkar (expatriate Goan), for close to fifty years. His death had gone unnoticed in India, but it has left a void in my life—a void best expressed by Lance himself, again in the letter of November 13, 1994: “This absence of contact seems to have been so needless. I feel a sense of great loss after hearing you on the phone.”
NOTE: I am grateful to Ana Rita Ribeiro and Marsha Ribeiro for their prompt and generous help in answering my queries.
R. Parthasarathy
Indian poet, translator and critic Saratoga Springs, New York
Easter Sunday, April 2012 (Revised 2020)
First printed in Restless Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Britain, Bangkok: River Books Co., 2013, pages 11-14.
Lancelot Ribeiro and Jatin Das in Delhi in 1998 next to Large Red Head (Awaiting Revelation) Image courtesy of the Artist’s Estate.
Stricken Monk with Cat O’Nine Tails (Psychedelic Man Series), 1968
Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 71 ⅔ x 49 ¾ in (182 x 126.4 cm)
Woman with Ruby Pendant (Psychedelic Man Series), 1968 Oil and polyvinyl acetate on PVA-based canvas, 70 ½ x 46 ⅚ in (179 x 119 cm)
1968
The Juggler (Psychedelic Man Series),
Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 30 ⅔ x 23 in (78 x 58.5 cm)
of the Grail (Psychedelic Man Series), 1968
Knight
Polyvinyl acetate on PVA-based canvas, 31 ⅔ x 24 in (80.5 x 61 cm)
St Francis of the Assisi (Psychedelic Man Series), 1968
Polyvinyl acetate on PVA-based canvas, 31 ⅔ x 24 in (80.5 x 61 cm)
Bull Icon/Bull’s Head, 1966
Oil, polyvinyl acetate and metallic pen on canvas, 14 ⅕ x 11 in (36 x 28 cm)
Untitled (Erotic Piece), 1967
Polyvinyl acetate and metallic paint on canvas, 13 ½ x 14 ½ in (34.3 x 37 cm)
Untitled (Head), 1963 Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 34 ⅖ x 23 ⅝ in (87.5 x 60 cm)
The Flight, 1968 Oil, polyvinyl acetate and metallic pen on canvas, 66 ⅞ x 30 ⅔ in (170 x 78 cm)
Divinity, 1968
Oil, polyvinyl acetate and metallic pen on canvas, 60 x 31 ⅞ in (152.5 x 81 cm)
Untitled (Head), 1966
Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 32 ⅔ x 24 ⅕ in (83 x 61.5 cm)
Frolic on a Nuclear Playground, 1965
Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 32 ½ x 50 ⅖ in (82.5 x 128 cm)
Emblematic Response, 1965
Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 30 ⅞ x 47 ⅝ in (78.5 x 121 cm)
Together, 1965
Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 37 x 48 ⅘ in (94 x 124 cm)
Untitled (Erotic Piece), 1968
Polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 53 ⅛ x 33 in (135 x 83.7 cm)
Untitled (Erotic Piece), c. 1968
Polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 51 ½ x 33 in (130.8 x 83.7 cm)
Red on Black - Requiem, 1993
Acrylic, polyvinyl acetate, crayon and collage on double A4 affixed printed paper sheets, 65 ½ x 45 ⅞ in (166.5 x 116.5 cm)
Large Red Head (Awaiting Revelation), 1996-98
Acrylic, polyvinyl acetate, crayon and collage on architecturally drawn paper, 46 ⅔ x 32 ⅞ in (118.5 x 83.6 cm)
Untitled (Townscape), 1962 Oil on board, 24 x 23 in (61 x 91.5 cm)
(Townscape
), 1963
Next page; Untitled (Landscape with Church), c. 1963 Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 29 ⅛ x 48 ⅖ in (74 x 123 cm)
Untitled
with Moons
Oil on board, 60 x 48in (152.5 x 122 cm)
Untitled (Night Townscape), c. 1963
Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 34 ⅔ x 44 in (88 x 112 cm)
Untitled (Townscape), 2004
Acrylic, pen and graphite on canvas board, 19 ⅔ x 15 ¾ in (50 x 40 cm)
Festivities and a Huddle of Domes, 2004
Acrylic pen and graphite on canvas board, 9 ⅔ x 15 ¾ in (50 x 40 cm)
Untitled (Townscape), 1962 Ink on paper, 14 ⅞ x 11 in (37.9 x 28 cm)
Untitled (Townscape), 1960 Ink on paper, 14 x 9 ⅕ in (35.5 x 23.3 cm)
Untitled (Townscape), 1963 Ink on paper, 8 ⅚ x 9 ⅕ in (22.5 x 23.3 cm)
Untitled (Townscape), 1964 Ink on paper, 13 ⅚ x 8 ⅞ in (35.2 x 22.3 cm)
Untitled (Townscape), 1966
Felt-tip marker and crayon on paper, 9 ⅘ x 14 ⅘ in (24.9 x 37.6 cm)
ABOUT LANCELOT RIBEIRO
Lancelot Ribeiro (b. Bombay, 1933; d. London, 2010) was born into a Roman Catholic family from Goa and was the younger half-brother of F. N. Souza, with whom he shared a close bond. From a young age, Ribeiro observed his brother’s rise in the Progressive Artists’ Group, often welcoming its members at their family home. Educated at St. Xavier’s in Mumbai, he later described his turbulent experience at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Rajasthan as the beginning of his journey as an artist. At sixteen, he followed Souza to Britain, initially studying accountancy while staying with his brother’s family in London.
In 1963, Ribeiro co-founded the Indian Painters Collective, which evolved into Indian Artists UK (IAUK) in 1979, championing Indian artists in Britain. Throughout his career, Ribeiro held nearly 70 exhibitions worldwide, including notable shows with his brother, such as The Arts of India (1966) and Five Indian Artists (1976). His retrospective at Leicester’s Museum & Art Gallery in 1986 marked a major solo milestone. His final show in India, held in 1998, marked a symbolic return 30 years after he had left the country.
Education
1951-53
Life Drawing (part-time), St. Martin’s School of Art, London, UK
1950
St Xavier’s High School for Boys, Mumbai, India
1944
St. Mary’s Senior Cambridge School, Mount Abu, Rajasthan, India
1942
St. Xavier’s Junior School for Boys, Mumbai, India
Select Posthumous Solo Exhibitions
2024
Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads In and Out of our Time, Ben Uri Gallery, London, UK
Lancelot Ribeiro: Requiem, Aicon, New York, USA
2023
Finding Joy in a Landscape at Burgh House, Burgh House, London, UK
2018
Lancelot Ribeiro: A Voyage of Discovery, New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester, UK An Artist in India & Europe, Grosvenor Gallery in association with Oberon Gallery, Leicester, UK
2016-17
The Retracing Ribeiro year-long project wins Heritage Lottery Fund support and includes an exhibition at Burgh House Museum (London, UK) and special events at the British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum dedicated to the artist.
2014-15
Lancelot Ribeiro, An Artist in India and Europe, Grosvenor Gallery, London, UK; Saffronart, New Delhi, India and Mumbai, India; Sunaparanta Centre, Goa, India
2013
Restless Ribeiro, Asia House, London, UK
Select Solo Exhibitions
1998
LTG Art Gallery, New Delhi, India
1996
Galerie Signum, Heidelberg, Germany
Galerie Andreas Hass, Viernheim, Germany
Burgehaus, Mannheim, Germany
1994
Galerie Signum, Heidelberg, Germany
Galerie Loanhard, Basel, Switzerland
1991-92
Galerie Signum, Heidelberg, Germany
1989
Annegrete Henke Gallery, Marbug, Germany
Galerie Einbaum, Frankfurt, Germany
1986-87
Retrospective 1960-1986, Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, UK
Lancelot Ribeiro, Paintings: A Retrospective, 1960-1986, Swiss Cottage Library, London, UK
1985
Ferreira Gomes, London, UK
1984
Henny Handler, London, UK
1980
Gardner Arts Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Paintings by Lancelot Ribeiro, Brian O’Malley Gallery & Arts Centre Rotherham, UK
1978
Lancelot Ribeiro Paintings, Abbot Hall Art Gallery & Museum, Kendal, Cumbria, UK
1974
Lancelot Ribeiro, Paintings and Drawings, Margaret Fisher Gallery, London, UK
1973
Lancelot Ribeiro, University of Sussex, School of African and Asian Studies, Brighton, UK
Deson-Zaks Gallery, Illinois, USA
1971
Triangle Gallery, California, USA
Deson-Zaks Gallery, Illinois, USA
1969
Instituto Menezes-Braganza, Goa, India
Indo-German Association, Goa, India
1967
Economist Intelligence, London, UK
1965
Everyman Foyer Gallery, London, UK
1963
Rawinski Gallery, London, UK
1962
Kunika Art Centre, New Delhi, India
Ashoka Art Gallery, Kolkata, India
Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi, India
Roopa Art Gallery, Mumbai, India
1961
Bombay Artist Aid Centre, Mumbai, India
Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, India
Select Posthumous Group Exhibitions
2023
Landscape & Forms: Two Indian Master Artists, Lancelot Ribeiro and Avinash Chandra, Delhi, India
2021
Lancelot Ribeiro ARTWORKS, Grosvenor Gallery, London, UK
2020
South Asian Modern Art 2020, Grosvenor Gallery, London, UK
South Asian Art 1820-2020, Grosvenor Gallery, London, UK
Midnight’s Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, London, UK
2019
The Roots of the Indian Artists’ Collectives, Grosvenor Gallery, London, UK
New Acquisitions, Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, London, UK
India Art Fair, Delhi, India
2016
Indian Modernist Landscapes 1950-1970, Grosvenor Gallery, London, UK
2014
England & Co Gallery, London, UK
India Art Fair, New Delhi, India
Select Group Exhibitions
2010
British Art Fair, England & Co, London, UK
1980
Exhibition of Paintings by IAUK (Indian Month), Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, London, UK
1979
Rainbow Art Group, Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, UK
Indian High Commissioner’s Residence, London, UK
1978
City and East London College, London, UK
Four Leading Indian Artists, India House, London, UK
1977
Painters of the Gallery, ARTS 38, London, UK
Indian Painting, Fenwicks Store, London, UK
1976
Five Indian Artists, ARTS 38, India Tea Centre, London, UK
1975
Rainbow Gallery, London, UK
1974
Fourth European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (Commonwealth Institute), University of Sussex, School of African and Asian Studies, Brighton, UK
Indian Painters, UNESCO International Art Week, Kilburn Polytechnic, London, UK
Exhibition of Paintings, Mandeer Gallery, London, UK
1973
Four Contemporary Indian Artists, Museum and Art Gallery, Brighton, UK
The Grange Museum and Art Gallery, Rottingdean, UK
1971
Deson-Zaks Gallery, Illinois, USA
1968
ESP Trends 1968, Painting and Sculpture, Federation of British Artists (FDA) Galleries, London, UK
1967
Rosenthal and Treadwell, Croydon, UK
Camden Picture Loan Scheme, London, UK
1966
Camden Picture Loan Scheme, London, UK
The Arts of India, The Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK
1965
Painters from Hampstead, Everyman Foyer Gallery, London, UK
1964
Group of Six, John Whibley Gallery, London, UK
Hundred Painters from London / Summer Exhibition, New End Gallery, London, UK
Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, London, UK
Six Indian Painters, Indian Painters Collective, India House, London, UK
1963
Galerie Lambert, Paris, France
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, UK
1962
Piccadilly Gallery, London, UK
Rawinsky Gallery, London, UK
John Whibley Gallery, London, UK
1961
Ten Indian Painters, sponsored by the Indian Writers Association and UNESCO, Madras, India (followed by tour of several cities in Indian, Europe, USA and Canada)
Roopa Art Gallery, Mumbai, India
Kumar Gallery, New Delhi, India
Ashoka Art Gallery, Kolkata, India
Posthumous Events
2018
Passport to the Motherland—Migration Dreams, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
2017
Ribeiro: A Celebration of Life, Love and Passion (UK India Year of Culture), Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
2016
Remembering Lancelot Ribeiro and Other Indian Artists in the 1960s Britain (Asian Art in London 2016), The British Museum, London, UK
2016-17
The Retracing Ribeiro project exploring the artist’s life and work wins Heritage Lottery Fund support with Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, The British Museum, V&A, Central Saint Martins and Camden Archives, as partners
Select Publications
Lancelot Ribeiro, An Indian Painter in Hampstead, (Grosvenor Gallery), 2023. The Roots of the Indian Artists’ Collectives, (Grosvenor Gallery), 2019.
Anita Roy,“Breaking Walls,” The Indian Quarterly, 2017.
Dan Carrier, “Ribeiro: Celebrating ‘Forgotten’ Artist’s Odyssey,” Camden New Journal, 2017. Indian Modernists’ Landscapes, 1950-1970, (Grosvenor Gallery), 2016.
Marsha Ribeiro, “Retracing Ribeiro Education Pack,” 2016.
Bridget Galton, “Retracting Ribeiro,” Ham and High, 2016.
David Buckman, Lancelot Ribeiro: An Artist in India and Europe, (Francis Boutle Publishers), 2014.
Katriana Hazell, Restless Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Britain, (River Books), 2013.
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, “An Apocalyptic Portrayal of the End of the World, By a Painter Who is One of Our Own,” Navhind Times, 2016.
Public Collections
Alliance Française, Mumbai, India
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
Brighton Royal Pavilion, Museums and Art Gallery, Brighton, UK
British Museum, London, UK
Burgh House, Hampstead, UK
Camden Libraries and Arts, London, UK
Chase Manhattan Bank, USA
Centre for Plastic and Performing Arts, Mumbai, India
First National City Bank, New York, USA
Gardner Arts Centre Collection, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India
Kunika Art Centre, New Delhi, India
Leicestershire Museums & Art Gallery, Leicester, UK
Mitsui Bank, Japan
Museum of Contemporary Art, Goa, India
Museums of Tata Treasures, Mumbai, India
New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester, UK
Tata Companies, Mumbai, India
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Ooty, India
Tata Iron and Steel, India
Tata Industries Ltd, India
Tate, London, UK
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
Thank you to Marsha Ribeiro, 108 Art Projects, and Sethu Vaidyanathan for their collaboration on the exhibition.
Contributors
Parthasarathy, R. “Remembering Lance Ribeiro.” In Restless Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Britain, 11-14. Bangkok: River Books Co., Ltd., 2013. Included with permission from the Artist’s Estate.
Photography
Exhibition photography by Sebastian Bach. Artwork and achival photographs courtesy of the Artist’s Estate.
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