Frieze Magazine - The Best Shows to See During Art Toronto 2023
Referencing the five elements (wood, water, metal, earth and fire) of Chinese Wuxing philosophy, Zhang presents photography, sculptures and installations that mediate cultural connection, remembrance and projection through transplanted lives. Altar-like forms structure the exhibition as a quietly resonant space that elevates and transforms kitschy commercial products into works that carry personal and historical weight. Fire Elemental (2023) – a red, large-format archival inkjet print situated between two plinth-like structures – for example, arrays cheap convenience-store lighters and household candles against a red background, recalling shrines that honour the dead. Such works suggest that ordinary objects – even those which are cheap, mass-produced or easy-to-discard – can act as critical stand-ins for distant places. At the same time, works like Earth Elemental, in which replicas of gongshi (scholar’s rocks) are displayed in front of a marble background as interior design objects, highlight how such items can become denuded of cultural value. In a deftly designed exhibition, Zhang probes the ways in which we try to maintain the essence of who we are through reproductions associated with diasporic homelands that are both endlessly desired and elusive.
CP24 - Art Toronto 2023
Interview with CP24 on Patel Brown’s upcoming showcase at the Toronto Annual International Art Fair - Art Toronto.
In studio preview of some of the works from the booth with Breakfast television host. Including works by Shaheer Zazai, Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Shellie Zhang and Winnie Truong.
New York Times - Art Fair Review: The Armory Show 2023
It’s hard to miss the giant earth-colored figure crawling out of the Canadian gallery Patel Brown’s booth. Made of polymer clay, synthetic hair and other materials, the humanoid creature wears a mask — or perhaps its face is a mask. Made by Marigold Santosand Rajni Perera, the sculpture suggests deities and mythological figures from the artists’ cultures (Santos is from the Philippines and Perera from Sri Lanka), as well as life-changing experiences like motherhood. In their hands, art also becomes a place to create hybrids or new “Indigenous” sprites and spirits, drawing from imagined, imperiled or lost ones.
Frieze Magazine - What to See in Toronto this October 2022
What sense do rules make in the hands of an artist in a gallery space? Maria Hupfield does what she wants in this exhibition. Her cool, grey, Joseph Beuys-like replicas of domestic objects and spaces are portraits of the pandemic self: a ukulele with a limp neck sits on a plywood shelf (Bright Sound, all 2022); an approximation of her father’s defunct rotary telephone hangs on the wall (Party Line to Yesterday); a kissing booth of sorts entitled Biindigen (Prototype) (‘come in’ in Ojibwe) has a soft door that does not stay shut. In the series ‘Chair Exercises’, large-format prints of a bendy, felt chair are funny yet dark: is it trying to stand or has it simply given up, twisting and crossing itself into new forms of refusal? None of the objects work in this felt world, but they offer warmth and comfort, despite their industrial, scratchy fibres. Hard and soft, Hupfield’s friendly forms resist, attempt to rise but, ultimately, droop.
Artsy - New York Art Week 2022
This Toronto-based gallery was in high spirits as it made its NADA New York debut with an impressive booth featuring a variety of artists working across sculpture, photography, and mixed media. Patel-Brown, which opened during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, was one of the many galleries excited to meet with collectors after developing a thorough digital practice for online sales over the past two years. The gallery foregrounds works by artists of the global majority (across African, Caribbean, Indigenous, and Asian diasporic communities) working in Canada.
The eye-catching color photography by Jamaican Canadian artist Daniesha Nugent-Palache immediately attracts the viewer’s eye while walking the fairgrounds. The large-scale print You Can’t Spell Talons Without Salon (2019) features a woman’s arm in a glow-in-the-dark environment that shifts our attention from her body to her nails, jewelry, and the white bird perched on top of her elbow. The print, like her other work, which ranges from $2,400 to $4,000, uses objects related to the body to negotiate her identity rather than represent her likeness.
Across from Nugent-Palance’s work, visitors will encounter the incredible sculptural work of Nigerian Canadian artist Oluseye. His “Ploughing Liberty” series (2021), which ranges from $4,200 to $6,000, views cultural legacies of slavery and migration of Africans and Carribbeans in Canada through the prism of nationality. Oluseye does so by blending hockey sticks—often considered a beacon for white Canadian identity—with found agricultural tools to reference the historic, often overlooked labor that Black individuals have done in constructing Canadian history.
The booth was met with much excitement, with several editions of Nugent-Palance’s prints and the available work from Oluseye’s “Ploughing Liberty” series selling by midday Wednesday.
Art News - NADA New York 2022
Oluseye, a Nigerian-Canadian artist who recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, brought a large selection of his “Plowing Liberty” series to Patel Brown Gallery’s NADA booth. The works fuse found materials that Oluseye has collected around the U.S., Nova Scotia, and Ontario, in particular hockey sticks and farming tools, and comment on the little-known history of the Loyalists of Preston, a Black community of Loyalists who fled to Canada following the Revolution. When they settled in Canada, they were given untillable land and struggled to eke out their living. In the “Plowing Liberty” series, the farm tools, which represent hard labor, are contrasted with hockey sticks, symbols of a sport that remains dominated by white Canadians, even though Black athletes have played alongside them for years.
Artsy - Expo Chicago 2022
Another booth in EXPO Chicago’s Exposure program, Toronto’s Patel Brown is showing the paintings of Marigold Santos and the sculptures of Alexa Hatanaka. Santos, who immigrated to Canada from the Philippines with her family in the late 1980s, fills her works with enigmatic, inky figures. With allusions to her migrant story and the complexities of identity that it entails, these works are pensive, simultaneously calm and probing.
Hatanaka’s work is grounded in her Japanese Canadian identity and uses kamiko, the practice of sewing garments out of konnyaku starch–strengthened paper. Here, repurposed materials and hand-treated papers are transformed into fish and robes, imbuing reminders of the past with an environmentally focused urgency that belongs entirely to the present.
Hyperallergic - Art Toronto 2021
Devan Patel, co-owner and director of Patel Brown Gallery, believes “a real conversation about Canadian art can’t take place without a presence of Indigenous voices.” Patel Brown’s booth at Art Toronto features Indigenous works alongside pieces by creators from different backgrounds. Japanese-Canadian artist Alexa Hatanaka’s meticulous linocuts on handmade washi paper join stunning colored pencil drawings by the late Inuk artist Tim Pitsiulak. Sleek patinated bronze sculptures by Oluyese, whose work is often informed by his Yoruba heritage, meet vibrant acrylics by Native Art Department International, the collaborative project of Indigenous Toronto-based artists Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan.
Art Forum - Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber 2021
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber’s exhibition Precarity (April 3 - May 8, 2021) is a must-see in Art Forum’s Art Guide.
Dumontier & Farber distill nuanced emotional moments, often to humorous effect. Utilizing various juxtapositions of familiar objects (flowers, houses, books), the works read as a categorical indexing of linguistic and painterly exploration.
Globe and Mail - Rajni Perera 2021
The Toronto artist and Sobey Award finalist Rajni Perera is known for colourful paintings of fantastical Eastern figures, as though Indian miniatures had been enlarged by an encounter with Star Wars. Her fantastical myths for a multicultural future became all the more intriguing when they took three-dimensional form in the Sobey finalists’ show at the National Gallery of Canada. There she displayed a bright blue female bust wearing a multicoloured scarf and high headdress, a provocative figure sticking out a long blue tongue.
Dallas News - Shaheer Zazai 2021
As ever, it’s worth the price of admission to scope out hundreds of artworks, nearly all of them contemporary, in one afternoon. In a quick lap around the building, visitors will come across a new work by the British painter Neil Raitt at Anat Ebgi, a Los Angeles gallery; a large scale Ayanah Moor painting, resting atop two leather pillows at Ruschman, a Chicago gallery; and a series of works made entirely in Microsoft Word by Shaheer Zazai at Patel Brown, a Toronto gallery. You’ll never look at a .docx the same way again.
Globe and Mail - Shellie Zhang 2020
At the Patel Gallery, Shellie Zhang is also in the business of manufacturing exotica, although her fruit photography is more transparent about the process, and potentially humorous in its use of riotous colour and trompe l’oeil effects. Mimicking the Asian practice of leaving offerings at graves, Zhang mounds perfect specimens of outlandishly bright fruits, some real, some artificial, in equally ornate dishes to create photographs that, like Bouchard’s, are surreal in saturation.
Patel Brown - Canadian Art 2020
“Last week, two significant contemporary art dealers in Toronto, Devan Patel and Gareth Brown-Jowett, announced they would be partnering as Patel Brown.
… Patel: “There is a shared hope, motivation and accountability that comes with collaboration.”
Patel Brown is hoping to open a physical space in Toronto this summer—but is also looking to some online projects, specifically the commissioning of critical essays, to drive conversation while many galleries are closed.
“This [essay] initiative was definitely accelerated by COVID, but I think also we thought, ‘Okay, this is the perfect time to activate a focus on criticality and writing,’” says Patel. “People are being bombarded with images, but we are asking people to stop and take a moment to consider what they are looking at from a deeper place.”
Globe and Mail - Shaheer Zazai 2020
If there is an argument for getting closer than you should to an artwork, it can be found in A Study in Human Error, an exhibition by Afghan-Canadian artist Shaheer Zazai that can be viewed by appointment until Sept. 26 at Toronto’s Patel Brown East. Zazai pairs his trippy acrylic paintings with painstakingly produced digital carpets that, upon inspection, have been “woven” using Microsoft Word – a most quotidian medium for such intricate designs. Squint your eyes, and you’ll notice keystrokes in the place of stitches. “It’s the first time I’ve shown my paintings and carpets together,” says Zazai, “and process-wise, they’re actually quite similar: Both are improvised, and the outcomes are the result of troubleshooting in the moment.”
Nadia Waheed
Canadian Art - Collecting Guide 2020
“Taking time to visit emerging galleries and doing studio visits is a great opportunity to diversify a collection and discover new work. Joining a young patrons group at a museum can expose you to new artists and critical issues in contemporary art through programming. It can also be a lot of fun to engage new forms of artmaking: videos, multiples, internet art, experiential and conceptual works. Most importantly, be open to new perspectives and aesthetics by engaging in dialogue with fellow collectors, curators and artists. I think of collecting as a form of self-expression and in this way, the well-informed collector who sees and hears more will be in tune with the best and most diverse expression of collecting.” - Devan Patel
Cree artist Kent Monkman, centre, and Devan Patel, right, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art event for Monkman's monumental paintings.
This latest Canadian Art Social felt younger than in years past, a reflection of the foundation’s concerted effort to include the next generation in their happenings. This year a $250 ticket for the under-35 set was offered – a quarter of the going rate for a regular ticket. My host, Tanner Kidd, a recent addition to the organization’s board of directors, was among them hosting tables of gen-next enthusiasts. Art collectors and patrons including Emmanuelle Gattuso, Gerry Sheff and Shanitha Kachan, David and Kate Daniels, architects Marianne McKenna, Bruce Kuwabara and Josh Josephson, and a plethora of gallerists including Devan Patel and Daniel Faria were at nearby tables of 10, each of which were dotted with a sculpture by artist Jeremy Laing.
RBC - Rajni Perera commission 2019
After OCAD University, Perera funded her own shows. “Nobody wanted to put the work anywhere – I could sell but I couldn't get it into a gallery." This period of time allowed the artist to develop the business skills and promotional knowledge necessary to not only float her own practice and provide for her family, but to raise gallery profiles and create community around the work. Shortly after signing with Devan Patel of Patel Gallery, she met RBC's curatorial team in 2017. The RBC Emerging Artists Project had funded the catalogue for the Art Gallery of York University exhibition Migrating the Margins, which showcased work from emerging Scarborough artists. Perera was one of the artists.
Canadian Art - News Roundup 2019
Patel Division Projects has launched in Toronto. This is a partnered project between Galerie Division Toronto and Patel Gallery located at 45 Ernest Avenue in Toronto that hosts exhibitions and inventory by artists from both galleries’ rosters. The first exhibition is with Patel artist Rajni Perera, opening September 19. This joint venture is under the direction of Devan Patel.
Toronto Star - Kent Monkman Exhibition 2018
You can’t let a Kent Monkman show pass unnoticed. Not that there’s really any danger of that — on a recent Saturday at Project Gallery, where Monkman’s Miss Chief’s Praying Hands opened recently, at least a dozen people milled in predictably enraptured glee… Brimming with art-history references colliding with queer and Indigenous imagery, it’s a smorgasbord of Monkman tropes, delivering on comfortable expectations of titillation.
CP24 - Nuit Blanche 2017
Interview with CP24 on ‘Since Now, From Then’ a series of art installations, performances and activations for Nuit Blanche 2017 centered around the new Broadview Hotel, presented in collaboration with the Project Gallery, Streetcar Developments, ERA Architects, Riverside BIA and East End Arts.
Patrick Martinez
CBC - Drake’s Collection 2017
And while his digs have a great view of Toronto's biggest landmark, he is, surprisingly, not repping "The 6" on his walls. The complete absence of Canadian or Toronto artists, says Patel, is unfortunate — but he could suggest dozens of Canadian artists Drake might like, if he ever wants to expand his collection: Alex McLeod, Rajni Perera, Nep Sidhu, Tau Lewis, Talwst, SoTeeOh. And as for that last one: "I actually think Drake might've even reposted this image by the artist before (without credit)."
Ness Lee and Tessar Lo
CBC - Toronto For Everyone 2017
Devan Patel, a Toronto art consultant and gallery owner, represents Lee and Lo through his company Art Works Consulting. "It's such a great context for an emerging artist to have their work in the Power Plant," he says. "Having institutions feature emerging artists' work is such a big deal." Patel is currently a member of the jury that selected art for Timeraiser's upcoming Toronto party, but before working with the organization, he says he found himself discovering new talent through their events. He cites photography and installation-based artist Matt Waples as an example. "I personally purchased his work and did a show with him. And that was how I became aware of his work."
NOW Magazine - Best Independent Gallery 2015
Project Gallery Toronto voted ‘Best Independent Gallery’ in Toronto according to NOW Magazine People’s Choice Awards.
Pan Am Games - 2015
Video of the inaugural bike ride of the curated Pan Am Path with series of art installations, produced by East End Arts and curated by Devan Patel.
Grid TO - Live Art 2014
Inside Toronto - Gallery Crawl 2013
“Being in a very new space where people are very receptive and people are very interested in what’s happening, you can kind of make an impression on the cultural scene there because it hasn’t been played out a lot,” said Devan Patel, co-director at Project Gallery, which opened in Leslieville eight months ago.
Patel approached other gallery owners in the area to organize the crawl after noticing they often host openings on similar nights.
Patel said they thought it would be a good idea to capitalize on the number of people already coming down to see one show by providing a guided tour from gallery to gallery.