Alex J.Tavares

Alex Joseph Tavares was born on 9 April on the island of Zanzibar, then a British protectorate off the east coast of Africa. In 1938, as fears grew of a German invasion, the family returned to its ancestral home in Goa, the capital of Portuguese India. His mother tongue is Konkani.

He was a young artist when India won independence in 1947. The political, social and religious debate that followed shaped his thinking, and gave him a deep knowledge of religious imagery and of how other artists had treated it.

In 1950 he began a five-year course at St. Joseph's Technical School in Madras under the Spanish artist Juan Monzan. He finished a year early, carving monumental wood sculptures for churches in Madras, Guntur and Bangalore along the way, then stayed on to teach at the school.

A scholarship took him to the Escuelas Profesionales in Barcelona in 1958, where he also studied drawing at the Academia de Bellas Artes. He received sculpture commissions for Brazil and Argentina while still a student, and in 1960 took his diploma in sculpture, painting and woodcarving. After a commission for the Colegio San Miguel in Madrid, he travelled across Europe visiting museums and galleries.

His first one-man exhibition, at the home of Dr. Leão Pinto in Goa in 1961, was opened by the Governor-General of Portuguese India, General Vassalo e Silva. Days before Goa was surrendered to India on 19 December 1961, Tavares tried to visit the General to argue that Goa had the culture, languages and creative spirit to stand on its own. The guards turned him away at the palace gates.

He stayed through the turmoil for another eighteen months, then left for East Africa in 1963. He has returned since only through memory, and that exile became the muse for much of his work.

Tavares arrived in Nairobi just before Kenyan independence and found work as a colour consultant for a paint company, painting and sculpting in his own time. An early breakthrough came when he won a street-decorating competition during the independence celebrations.

In 1965 he held his first Nairobi one-man show at the Chemchemi Cultural Centre, sponsored by the Fairfield Foundation of New York and curated by the South African writer Es'kia Mphahlele. Exhibitions followed in 1967 and 1968 at Paa-ya-Paa, the gallery founded by E.P. Njau. While many of his contemporaries painted wildlife and tribal symbolism, Tavares made searing social and political commentary in a classically trained surrealist style.

People from different walks of life in the city have flocked to see this show. It is as if an elephant has come to town for the first time! — E.P. Njau, 1967

In February 1969 he arrived in Arcola, Saskatchewan, in the middle of a prairie winter, his paintings shipped intact from Nairobi. His exhibition at Regina's Central Public Library stirred passionate debate and became the subject of a CBC News feature.

In Toronto he built his reputation by showing in libraries across the city, exhibited at Zella 9 in London in 1971, and made his Toronto one-man debut at the Picture Loan Gallery in 1972. His work turned to human abuse of the environment, most notably in the Drape Series, developed over more than thirty years, along with Drape Figures and the Ozone Memo series.

His 25-year retrospective opened at the Wexford Art Centre in 1986. He has since shown in China, Japan, New Zealand, Mexico and St. Kitts, and began the Millennium Series in 2000. In later years he moved his studio to Mount Albert, Ontario, to concentrate on sculpture.