Sohan Qadri: The Seer

Description

The first monograph of the Indian artist Sohan Qadri, a modern Tantric painter. Born in 1932 in Punjab, India, Qadri began his quest for his true self through Tantric yoga and spent long periods of time silently meditating in remote temples in the Himalayas and Tibet. His isolation propelled his urge to paint. He received his MFA in 1960 from the Government College of Art in Simla, India, but soon discovered that academic trappings were not for him. Shortly after his first exhibition in 1965, he left India for the West. In Qadri's work, there is a tranquil coexistence of binary opposites - male and female, known and unknown, physical and spiritual. Although he clearly has Western influences, such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, his work is uniquely Eastern. His paintings are monochrome surfaces with structural effects that, in their repetition, convey the rhythmic expressions of colour energies. The vibrations created by these energies are endless and break the boundaries between the inner space of the image and the external space of the viewer. Heinrich Boell, the 1972 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, said that Qadri, "with his painting liberates the word meditation from its fashionable taste and brings it back to its proper origin uninfluenced by Western propaganda, misunderstandings and corruptions."

Donald Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics.