Dev is a Swiss-Indian artist and poet who is known for his subtle and passionate works of art. His unique style combines both Eastern and Western approaches, creating beautiful and powerful combinations of the two cultures. His poetry, in particular, has gained recognition among the international literary scene due to its emotional depth and engaging storylines. By taking traditional Indian culture and incorporating it with contemporary Western thinking, Dev has created a unique style that speaks to both worlds. He is also known for his humanistic approach in his art, as he often creates work that speaks to the intersection of cultures, life and death, and finding peace within our troubled world.”
Biographical Note
Dev was born in 1947 in Ludhiana, in the northern Indian state of Punjab, and spent his youth in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, until 1965, when he returned to New Delhi for his studies at the State Drama School, and five years later to Punjab.
He first published poetry in Punjabi as early as 1967. In his birthplace of Ludhiana, he had his first exhibition as a visual artist in 1970. In 1975 he received the first prize for painting from the Punjab Lalit Kala Academy for a large mural in the Punjab History Museum. In 1979 he moved to Switzerland. Fascinated by Paul Klee, he settled in Bern. Although Dev leads a cosmopolitan life and his different places of work find references in cycles of works such as “Rome”, “Barcelona” and “Buenos Aires”, he always returns to his adopted home of Bern. He currently lives and works in Rubigen, a small town near Bern.
While Dev is known in Europe primarily as a painter, he is in India mainly as a celebrated poet. Eight volumes of poetry have been published so far in Punjabi and in English. He has received a number of major awards for his poetry, including the Best Punjab Poet Living Abroad Award in 1992 and the National Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001, as well as the Punjab Shahid Sabha poetry award, New Delhi, in 2008. He is regularly invited to New Delhi as a guest lecturer.
In 2000, Punjabi published a book of reviews of his poetry, and in 2005, the novel” Earth”, reflecting on his life as a poet and painter.
Dev’s dual artistic personality as a painter and poet reduced the art historical reception of the last twenty years mainly to the descriptive pair “word” and “image”. Dev’s significant artistic development in recent years, however, has clearly transcended this dual interpretation, as evidenced by the art book published by Bank-Verlag in 2010. Although Dev’s latest paintings do not follow a specific painterly task, the polychrome horizontal layering in many large-format works refers to a landscape motif: for example, the view across the autumn-colored forests of the rolling hills in Dev’s adopted home, the Bernese Oberland.
© DEV, Art Book, by Kunst im Bank-Verlag, 2010
In Dev’s own words…
Between mirror and magic – some notes
For quite some time a process of cross-cultural patterns is going on in my recent work.
Signs not conditioned according to set archetypal attitudes of visual behaviour.
Gestural move as pictorial text.
Art and Love are pure forms of action.
It says no to all forms of compromises one has to do in style, technique or relationships which take away the natural and aesthetic growth of the artist.
Art is not a therapy because it is against any kind of functionality. It is the actuality of time-zone transcended.
For me Art and Love has to prove nothing; in both of this you are cursed to remain lonely but not in-ward unhappy.
“Reality” or the “real” is a deception which we build around our egos. I am always trying to define space between reality and my dream. Space which has 3 continental upbringings in my being. The true actuality without any
escape, pretentions and projections.
For me that is “Reality’ which ”1′ ….. create in art and a grain of a small possibility in life.
An absolute way to sublime and monochrome.
Space is prayer and passion, and silence as its only true language.
Space is not empty but full of constant movements and layers.
Differences, oppositions and putting them passionately together is a poetic obsession with me.
Signs of various moods, variations of cultures and the attitudes towards their visuality ask for a kind of perfection to create pictures with aesthetic and transcendent dimensions which become a political action on the onslaught of ugliness systematically being imposed and justified as the only “Reality” of our times and also sheltered under the umbrellas of institutionalized art “attitudes”.
Technique is a metaphysical code for the material world of the artist.
Silence of constant expanding spaces is “Religion” for me.
Around these silences I construct Zen-like voices or distances to keep away the dark shadows.
Shadows of mediocrity that always wants to turn oneself into cliche because it makes it easier not to SEE, FEEL and LIVE the real “presence” of the picture.
Communication is a way how one can form a question in relation to art and life. Art is not as “I know it” but
as “it is”; “I know” is a deviation and a projection that takes away the viewer from the “it-ness” of the picture-
being.
A viewer can create a new visual reality only by being “present” without making the images of the “act” of seeing.
Illuminated alertness of seeing is a self-satisfying action, an action without any “end” to achieve or somewhere to arrive at.
Intensity of little details and creative care towards them is of the same ratio-relationship in the “macro and rnicro world” of my paintings.
A pursuit for putting the opposites as a paradoxical paradigm and letting it flow and penetrate deep into the center of the pictorial spaces. Spaces which interdetermine voice and silence as sign code of my visual language and creativity.
Colour is celebration against the gray zones of passive psyche.
My pictures are small efforts of alertness of “seeing” to-wards the mysteries of creativity and cosmos.
Fire and light at the same time – that is my dream, my longing, my living in relation to “art”. Art and dream are the
ultimate reality for me.
[in Art Book «Dev», 1989]