Amol K Patil: The Piled Up Traces

Opening Reception:
Saturday, September 19, 6 — 8PM

François Ghebaly is thrilled to present The Piled-Up Traces, Amol K Patil’s first exhibition with the gallery, and the first presentation of his work in Los Angeles. Following its debut at the 12th SITE SANTA FE International, curated by Cecilia Alemani, The Piled-Up Traces brings together Patil’s work in bronze, kinetic sculpture and drawing in an overarching, theatrical installation exploring class and caste-based exploitation. 

Patil’s work draws from the artist’s Dalit background and family’s history of activism: his grandfather was a poet, and his father an avant-garde playwright. Patil continues this tradition of protest, responding directly to the conditions of daily life in Mumbai’s chawls, dense housing complexes built in the 1900s to house migrant workers, which continue to be a locus of resistance within the Dalit community. Patil models his sculptures in clay and casts them in bronze, before carefully applying a patina that mimics skin. His sculptures index the textures of the chawls, especially the weathered hands and feet of their residents. Often, Patil’s cast limbs emerge out of larger, abstract and rough-hewn forms, alluding to a collective body to which his individual subjects belong. This collectivity forms the political thrust of Patil’s work, building solidarity through shared everyday realities.

Patil’s exhibition sets his sculptures within a dimly-lit installation that encourages an intimate engagement with his works. The bare bulbs that light his sculptures emphasize their mottled surfaces, giving them the vividness of flesh, while also transforming the gallery into a more domestic space. Patil’s specific lighting design is mobilized in a kinetic work which features a bulb descending into and emerging from a small bronze mass of dirt and limbs. The sculpture at once refers to both the natural cycle of night and day, as well as the enforced, mechanical rhythm of labor, two systems which equally structure the rhythms of one’s life. The sculpture also reflects the ongoing struggle by the residents of the chawls for recognition: to emerge from darkness into light.

In dialogue with the sculptures on view in The Piled-Up Traces are Patil’s wall drawings in pen and ink. These grisaille drawings are meant to evoke scenes of daily life, as glimpsed through cracks in the walls of the chawls. The fugitive nature of these images is emphasized by their appearance on MDF covered with a wall base paint, as if salvaged from the ruins of the chawls. As government plans to redevelop the chawls displace their residents and exacerbate gentrification, Patil’s wall drawings preserve in fragments their daily social rhythms. The Piled-Up Traces deploys social observation and communal storytelling to resist erasure.

Amol K Patil (b. 1987, Mumbai, India; lives and works between Mumbai and Amsterdam) has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2025), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley (2025), De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg (2024, and  the Hayward Gallery, London (2023). Patil has participated in international exhibitions and biennials including the 12th SITE Santa Fe International (2025), Berlin Biennale (2025), Gwangju Biennale (2024), documenta 15, Kassel (2022), and the Yokohama Triennale (2020). His work has also been presented at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015), among other international institutions.