Paul Gopal-Chowdhury was born in India in 1949 and brought up in England where he studied at Camberwell (1967-68) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1969-73). Success followed; regular exhibitions in England and abroad including the Serpentine Gallery and Hayward Gallery, an invitation to select and exhibit in the Hayward Annual in 1979 and Artist in Residence at Gonville and Caius College and Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge in 1983-84. Then, in 1991, he withdrew from public sight to embark on what has been a ten-year process of change and he is now back with a set of exceptional paintings.

In these new paintings, collectively titled Paintings of Heaven and Hell, Gopal-Chowdhury has developed an iconographic language based upon a dialogue between two different visual worlds. These are intensely spiritual paintings where images from Indian mythology share the same canvas-space as east London street scenes; quite unlike his previous work.

As he has written, "… Paintings change when one has something to say. In my case a crisis nearly always accompanies this." The imagery of demons, angels and exotic creatures that has emerged in these new paintings has been brought about by long suppressed memories of a childhood in India. However, the bald fact that these paintings bring together two very different structures into one painting does not explain their qualities. They register as meditative and accomplished works only because the two contrasting elements have been combined in a way that gives the impression of an overall vision, but without any apparent sacrifice to their own particular identities. The London street scenes are painted with local colour, perspective and space. The Indian mythological scenes are painted in pure, saturated, rainbow-like colours, but in both, the colours and forms shift from being dense and solid to translucent and weightless, so that the whole maintains a precarious balance.

These paintings do not deal with ethnic issues; they deal with issues of language and cultural identity in a new multi-cultural age. Borne out of the concerns of an artist to find a way forward for painting, they are the synthesis of a ten-year process of experiment and consolidation that have the scope to develop in ways as yet unimagined. They may also anticipate a way forward for generations yet to come.