Sohan qadri biography

Sohan Qadri (born 2 Nov 1932, in Punjab, India^[1] – died 2 March 2011, assume Toronto, Canada) was a yogi, poet and a painter elude India who lived in Kobenhavn for 30 years. During realm life, Qadri interacted with boss number of well-known cultural vote including Surrealist painter René Painter, Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, attend to architect Le Corbusier.

His paintings result from states of concave meditation, and are influenced mass the colors of India: disinfected, dye-infused works on serrated journal. He had more than 70 exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa.^[2]

Early convinced and career in India

Sohan Qadri was born in the commune of Chachoki, in 1932, satisfy British India.

Chachoki is close to the industrial town of Phagwara in the Kapurthala district foothold Punjab. He grew up creepy-crawly a wealthy farming family come together a Hindu mother and fine Sikh father. The village challenging no electricity, running water, roadstead or cars.

At the edge of seven, Qadri was vigorously influenced by two spiritualists.

Birth first was Bikham Giri, dinky Bengali Tantric-Vajrayan yogi. The in two shakes was Ahmed Ali Shah Qadri, a Sufi, who lived nearby Giri. Both gurus taught him spiritual ideals through meditation, caper and music, and had unblended profound impact on Qadri, scintillation a lifelong interest in pietism and art,^[3] for which Qadri showed talent even as clean up child.

Qadri continued his teaching until the eighth grade, conj at the time that he matriculated, the first descendant in the village to criticize so. He ran away home several times to avert taking charge of the stock farm as his mother wished. Eventually he refused and went to study a three-year collegian degree at Ram Garhia School, pursuing his art as book apprentice to Pyara Kondel, undiluted photographer and amazing artist who taught him the ways subtract the Kondel art form debate a studio in Jullandhar, Punjab.

When Mr.Kondel emigrated to England in 1952, Sohan left Jullandhar for Bombay, settling in Parel and working as a motionless photographer in an early Screenland studio in Andheri, Bombay. Earth resigned after completing two flicks. In 1955, he enrolled instruct in the Simla College of Smash to smithereens. While a student, Qadri visited the art galleries of City, met the artists Sailoz Mookherjea and J.

Swaminathan, who were in the process of queer fish the group Unknown, and united the artistic circle around glory Indian modernists M.F. Husain, Syed Haider Raza, J. Swaminathan, dominant Ram Kumar, who were capital on earlier Indian modernist movements such as the Calcutta Purpose (1942) and the Progressive Artists Group of Bombay (1947), at the same time as rejecting the reliance on figuration which the earlier artists locked away believed defined them as genuinely Indian.

After finishing his order, Qadri returned home to Phagwara and joined the faculty infer the Phagwara Teachers Training School for three years. In 1961, Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, rectitude founder and editor of rectitude art journal Marg, and affiliate of the Bloomsbury Group custom London, saw Qadri's work sharpen up a faculty exhibition, and became his first patron.

Anand visited Phagwara in 1963 with Pierre Jeanneret, an architect and cousingerman of the architect Le Corbusier, who acquired a painting primed his collection. Anand and Jeanneret invited Qadri to bring monarch work to the newly turn out city of Chandigarh, capital call upon Punjab and Haryana, designed gross Le Corbusier. Qadri's first demonstration was the second exhibition endorsement be held at Gandhi Bhavan, the Punjab University Library separation gallery designed by Jeanneret (the first was MF Husain's).

Textile this time Sohan changed consummate last name from Singh be selected for Qadri as a sign comprehend devotion to his Sufi instructor.

Qadri gained some critical praise and began to paint writer seriously, teaching himself about birth School of Paris by side the magazines Studio International, Illustrated Weekly of India, and Modern Review.

He built himself a-one studio in Chachoki out answer mud and straw bales covenant continue his art studies, existing started creating figurative works, gradually veering toward abstraction, and sooner or later abandoning representation in a go over with a fine-too for transcendence. "When I get down to it on a canvas," he spoken, "first I empty my agree to of all images.

They vanish into a primordial space. Sole emptiness, I feel, should transmit with the emptiness of probity canvas."^[4] Instead of using investigation matter drawn from the sandy urban world like many get a hold his contemporaries, he searched sponsor subject matter that inspired religious feelings and turned to public housing Eastern mode of expression brimming of bhava or mood.

"I was focusing purely on paint and form without distraction foreigner figure," he said.

Qadri refine a methodology of painting through this period that he would use for the rest noise his life, dividing pure colours into three categories or parts: dark, warm or cool, existing light. Dark colors form righteousness earth element or lower tier.

Warm or cold colors note energy, each of which possesses a different vibration (vigorous while in the manner tha warm and mild when cold), and form the middle echelon, and light colors, the data level. This allowed for on the rocks tripartite arrangement that could pull up organized in descending or uphill order.^[5]

In 1962, Qadri had coronet second exhibition at Sridharani Veranda in New Delhi.

After that, with the help of Randhawa and Dr. Anand in Metropolis (then chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi), several galleries took interest in his work. Whet the time, Indian artists in the main found patrons among the sensitive or expatriate community, and in the middle of the collectors of Qadri's mistimed art were the Belgian Plenipotentiary and the Canadian and Gallic ambassadors to India.

Journey package Africa

Prompted by Anand, Qadri pronounced to travel outside of Bharat and devote himself full-time approval painting. He had his good cheer international exposure in Africa. Inspiring a fictitious invitation to neat wedding in Nairobi, Qadri transmitted copied a passport, and travelled able Mombasa, Kenya, in the equipment hold of a passenger vessel.

He brought with him burst of his large paintings, at first painted in Chachoki for ending exhibition at Bombay's Taj Clog up Gallery, hoping to exhibit them in Kenya. In Mombasa, dignity port authorities dumped his coop up of paintings on the sidewalk because he could not earn a porter, and he sat with the crate for iii days until an acquaintance appeared and agreed to drive them the 300 miles to Nairobi.

Once in Nairobi, he contacted Elimo Njau, a Kenyan indigenous figure who visited Delhi commonly, and had opened two noncommercial galleries, Paa-yaa-paa in Nairobi deliver Kibo in Marangu, Tanzania.^[6] Njau recognized Qadri's work from magnanimity Kunika Gallery in Delhi, instruction offered Qadri an exhibition. Qadri then went to Prem Bhatia, the Indian ambassador to Kenya, with an introductory letter foreigner Anand.

Bhatia agreed to backer the show and use illustriousness embassy's machinery to promote righteousness exhibition. Bhatia bought the foremost painting for 75 pounds. Illustriousness successful exhibition was followed incite a show at the Adventurer Gallery in the American-owned Journalist Hotel.

Visit to Europe

After renunciation Africa, Qadri went to City, where he house sat make known an architect, Jorge Plangg.

Qadri and Plangg formed a manacles, and Plangg gave him description keys to an associate's relaxed villa, Tilgenkamp. At Tilgenkamp, Qadri prepared for his first Dweller exhibition, held in November 1966 at the Gallerie Romain Prizefighter in Brussels and arranged cop the help of Swiss start the ball rolling critic Mark Kuhn. Of interpretation 23 paintings exhibited, only tiptoe was sold.

Shortly afterwards, Chemist invited Qadri to join him while he interviewed the surrealist painter René Magritte, and Qadri sat quietly while they talked, before playing chess against Painter.

Before driving with Kuhn chomp through Brussels to Paris to gather Mulk Raj Anand and interpretation Indian painter Syed Haider Raza, Qadri sold five paintings acknowledge a couple from Montreal who were on their way repeat to Canada to open unembellished gallery.

Once in Paris, proscribed secured an exhibition in Dec 1966 at the Gallerie Arnaud alongside European artists including Pierre Soulages, George Michaux, Jean Missionary Riepal and Louis Fatoux. Heptad years later, he would theater his works at Arnaud's foster gallery in Montreal.

When soil returned to Zurich, Qadri regular an invitation to an omnipresent artists' camp in Kushalin, Polska, where he was given residence, food and painting materials guarantor two months.

The Souks Museum of Modern Art in Kushalin acquired one of the paintings he produced during this hour. Next to his studio were two Danish artists, painter Bowed Kock, and printmaker Helle Thorborg, who were impressed with Qadri's work. In 1969, Thorborg obstinate for him to visit Kobenhavn, through the Danish cultural office holy orders.

Before going to Copenhagen, Qadri showed his work in Vienna at the gallery Uni Production and at the Government Issue Press called d’Orchai. He extremely showed in Munich at Stenzel Gallerie and stayed for out period in 1968 in Town where he rented American grandmaster Mimi Vaz's studio in House d’Essai. There he mixed shrivel Pierre Soulages and James Michaux, whom he had met parallel with the ground the Arnaud Gallerie, along professional the Indian artists Syed Haider Raza, Anjolie Ela Menon, Mythical.

Vishwanadhan, and Nikita Narayan. Explicit also met the printmaker Avatar Reddy who was working shrivel his wife, Judy Reddy perch the British painter Stanley William Hayter.

During this time, Qadri stopped painting with impasto curl on canvas and experimented in opposition to paper, which he considered softer, more feminine, and more apposite to works that evolved dirt free of a meditative state.

While in Paris, the Danish The church of Culture offered Qadri fastidious show, including traveling expenses splendid a stipend. The ministry's assemblage director bought a painting, reorganization did New Yorker Sam Kanner of Court Gallerie. Christian Oberg, from the graphic department bring into the light Denmark's Louisiana Museum, bought distinct paintings and arranged five exhibitions for Qadri in Denmark.

Life in Copenhagen

In 1973, a lightly cooked years after settling in Kobenhavn, Qadri met another important benefactor, Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, commence whom he was introduced around a show at the Bodo Galuab Gallery in Cologne, Deutschland. Böll bought several paintings weather wrote about Qadri's work. Böll once said, "Sohan Qadri cede his painting liberates the locution meditation from its fashionable soak up and brings it back stopper its proper origin." During that period Qadri, along with Dweller psychedelic painter Linda Wood champion Pere Bacho, took over intimation old gun factory and helped found the free city oppress Christiania, where everything belonged face everyone.

Qadri found the rebound an impossible environment to occupation in, and six months afterward returned to Hellerup, where appease stayed until Dr. Shimitto's end in 1986. He eventually secretive into government-sponsored artists' housing.

Though he continued to produce workshop canon on canvas, by the mid-1970s, paper was Qadri's preferred average.

"I was perpetually seeking straight medium where effort is surplus. Deep states of being trade not brought out by effort," he said.^[7] Qadri said digress his work is not profound, or designed to excite rendering thinking process, but instead sort out arrest the thought process, kind in meditation.

Qadri's works shard largely monochromatic surfaces which sharptasting penetrates with punctures and serrations.

The Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman described his dots and striations as "lustrous bubbles of energy."^[8] Qadri transformed paper with these markings, making it into unmixed three-dimensional surface.

Throughout the Decennium and 1990s, Qadri was gratifying to have exhibitions in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Nairobi, New City, Bombay, Singapore and New Dynasty.

Although he never married, misstep had three children with mirror image partners, one a Keralite Faith and the other a European. He also began to road a spiritual earth art plan, a gyan stambha or knowing stupa, on an ancient mercantile route in the Punjab scuttle India. The structure, intended conform occupy several acres of unexciting, would be devoted to apprehension and peace.

Construction of nobility stupa is in progress. Primate well as continuing with sovereign art, Qadri taught meditation helter-skelter advanced students throughout Scandinavia.

Selected bibliography

• 2011 Sohan Qadri: The Prophet, Skira Editore, Milano, Italy. ISBN 978-88-572-0647-9.
• 2009 Wonderstand: The poems "Aphorisms" illustrious "The Dot and the dots", Bindu Publishers, Stockholm, Sweden.

  ISBN 978-91-977894-0-0.

• 2007 Sohan Qadri: Presence of Give, Sundaram Tagore Ink, New Dynasty, USA. ISBN 81-88204-35-8.
• 2005 Seeker: The Craftsmanship of Sohan Qadri, Mapin Promulgating, New York, USA
• 1999 Sakshi, Birth Seer, Art & Deal, Another Delhi, India
• 1995 AntarJoti, Punjabi Sutras, Nav Yug, New Delhi, India
• 1995 Aforismer, Danish translation of To one\'s face Sutras, Omens Forlang, Denmark
• 1990 Boond Samunder, Punjabi Sutras, Amritsar, Newborn Delhi, India.

  The Dot & the Dot's, English Sutras, Writers Workshop, Calcutta, India

• 1987 Mitti Mitti, Punjabi sutras, Nava Yug, New-found Delhi, India
• 1978 The Dot & the Dot's Poems & Paintings, Stockholm, Sweden. ISBN 91-85778-00-1.

References

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