Avtarjeet Singh Dhanjal is an England-based sculptor of Indian origin. As well as a multi-media artist of Indian origin whose work has been shown internationally over four decades, who is nourished by the tension between the cultures of East and West, occupies a singular place in contemporary sculpture. Avtarjeet Dhanjal’s international reputation as an artist derives primarily from his work over many years, especially in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as a sculptor working in various mediums like wood, aluminium, stone, seeking out the relation to natural substances like weathered rocks and soil in his sculpture . His more recent work is focused on photography, installation and writing. After leaving Art School in 1970, he travelled extensively around East Africa gaining a teaching post with the Kenyatta University College in Nairobi, before giving this up to attend St Martin’s School of Art, London in 1974. Dhanjal seeks to produce art that enhances the quality of human life- in part by inviting silence, stillness and contemplation. He argues that, to be truly creative, the artist needs to disengage himself from the races of contemporary society and the art world itself, that the artist’s quest should be to escape from the crowd and become attuned to the inner silence. Thus, Dhanjal's work draws heavily on his experience of Indian aesthetic traditions, blending them with the influence of European and specifically British modernist sculpture .
