Aicon is delighted to announce 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."