Dev was a Swiss-Indian artist and poet known for his subtle and passionate works of art. His unique style combined both Eastern and Western approaches, creating beautiful and powerful syntheses of the two cultures. His poetry gained recognition on the international literary scene for its emotional depth and engaging narratives. By drawing from traditional Indian culture and integrating it with contemporary Western thought, Dev created a distinctive voice that resonated across cultures. He was also known for his humanistic approach to art, often exploring themes such as the intersection of cultures, life and death, and the search for peace within a troubled world.
Biographical Note
Dev was born in 1947 in Ludhiana, in the northern Indian state of Punjab, and spent his youth in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, until 1965, when he returned to New Delhi to study at the State Drama School. Five years later, he returned to Punjab.
He first published poetry in Punjabi in 1967. In his birthplace of Ludhiana, he held his first exhibition as a visual artist in 1970. He won the Punjab Lalit Kala Academy’s first prize for painting a large mural in the Punjab History Museum in 1975. In 1979, he moved to Switzerland. Fascinated by Paul Klee, he settled in Bern. Although Dev led a cosmopolitan life and his various places of work inspired cycles in Rome, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires, he always returned to his adopted home of Bern. He lived and worked in Rubigen, a small town near Bern.
While Dev was known in Europe primarily as a painter, in India he was celebrated mainly as a poet. Eight volumes of poetry were published in Punjabi and English. He received numerous major awards for his poetry, including the Best Punjab Poet Living Abroad Award in 1992, the National Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001, and the Punjab Shahid Sabha Poetry Award in New Delhi in 2008. He was 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, was published.
Dev’s dual artistic identity as both a painter and a poet has led art historical reception over the last two decades to focus largely on the descriptive pairing of “word” and “image”. However, his significant artistic development in later years clearly transcended this dual interpretation, as evidenced by the art book published by Bank-Verlag in 2010. Although his later paintings did not follow a specific painterly program, the polychrome horizontal layering in many large-format works evoked landscape motifs, such as views across the autumn-colored forests and rolling hills of the Bernese Oberland, the region surrounding his adopted home.
Dev passed away at his home in Rubigen in December 2025.
Commemorative Exhibition
Most of his paintings have been shipped to India, where a museum is being established in his honor.
A commemorative exhibition featuring the remaining works from Dev’s legacy will be held at the Bern-based gallery _artundweise kunst- und denkraum.
Vernissage: Thursday, June 18, 2026, 5:00 p.m.
Finissage: Friday, July 31, 2026, 5:00 p.m.
Address:
artundweise kunst- und denkraum
Lorrainestrasse 16, 3013 Bern
Link to the gallery: https://www.art-und-weise.org/
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]