At Iram Art Gallery, Ahmedabad, artist Rakesh Patel’s solo exhibition Sacred Cipher, curated by Satyajit Dave, is on view from October 3 to November 30, 2025. The exhibition presents Patel’s recent works in mixed media on wood and Corten steel, continuing his long-standing exploration of geometry as a symbolic bridge between the material and the spiritual realms.
Titled God is in My Courtyard, the series spans mediums including paper, wood, and steel, charting a progression that Dave describes as a movement from “diagram to relief to monument.” Patel’s mixed-media reliefs and sculptures transform carpentry fragments, rods, and spindles into interlocking geometries that evoke both industrial assemblage and the architecture of sacred spaces. Surfaces appear weathered and aged, lending the pieces an aura of recovered relics or reconstructed shrines.
Several works in wood, such as God is in My Courtyard (2025), range from compact 48-inch compositions to large-format panels exceeding eight feet in width. Their collage-like texture, coupled with painted geometric patterns, highlights the artist’s ongoing interest in the yantra and mandala traditions of South Asia while recalling modernist abstraction. The Corten steel sculptures extend this vocabulary into the public scale, their intersecting arcs and rust-tinted planes functioning as both industrial relics and meditative monuments.
Patel’s practice engages a wide spectrum of references—from the facades of Gujarati and Rajasthani temples to the assemblages of Louise Nevelson and the spiritual abstraction of S.H. Raza. Yet, his approach remains contemporary, treating geometry as a living code that both structures and spiritualizes everyday experience. As the title suggests, divinity, for Patel, is located not in distant temples but within the immediate spaces we occupy—our courtyards, workshops, and cities.
Sacred Cipher invites visitors to navigate this intersection of the sacred and the industrial through Patel’s layered compositions and sculptural forms. The exhibition’s conceptual and material depth situates it within current dialogues on faith, form, and the persistence of symbolic geometry in modern art.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
