Shanti Panchal HRBA

Statement

Shanti Panchal was born in Mesar, a village in Gujarat, India, and studied at the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai. He came to England on a British Council scholarship to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London from 1978-80, and has lived and worked in London since. He has been artist-in-residence at the British Museum, the Harris Museum in Preston and the Winsor & Newton Art Factory in London. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Britain and abroad.

He is renowned for his watercolour paintings, and has received awards at the John Moores Painting Prize, Liverpool and the BP Portrait Award, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and won first prize in The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition in 2001, and in 2012 won the second. He won the prestigious Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize in 2015 and last year in May 2016 was awarded Eastern Eye ACTA for the arts.

His work is in many private and public collections, including the Arts Council of England, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, The British Museum, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. In 1989 The Imperial War Museum commissioned his painting The Scissors, The Cotton and the Uniform, and in 2012 also acquired his painting The Boys Returned from Helmand for their Collection and recently The Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Collection, London.

He contributed to a touring show At the Edge: British Art 1950-2000, at Touchstones Rochdale; Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston; Gallery Oldham and Bolton Museum & Art Gallery during 2009-10.

He represented the UK at the South Korea International Art Fair in Seoul in 2010.

He was an invited artist at the Tate Britain-initiated exhibition Watercolour in Britain: Tradition and Beyond, touring Castle Museum, Norwich;  Millennium Gallery, Sheffield and Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle during 2010-11.