Dot among the Dots

Sohan Qadris work is being celebrated through a retrospective.

Written by Vandana Kalra
September 19, 2011 12:24 AM IST

2 min read

His is a journey that travels from Chachoki to Copenhagen,a place where he lived the last 30 years of his life. When a list is prepared of artists who were influenced by tantra in India,Sohan Qadri will certainly find a mention. His spiritual yearnings,after all,form an integral part of his oeuvre from the canvases he painted to the poems he penned. Six months after his death,an exhibition celebrating his work has been organised by Kumar Art Gallery,Sunder Nagar. This is the largest body of work ever seen on Qadri and includes oil on canvas as well as his unique medium of ink and vegetable dyes on paper, says gallerist Sunit Kumar while looking at the display in the exhibition titled Sohan Qadri- A Retrospective: Important Paintings from 1961-2010. Over 70 works of art that span five decades,are on display.

Kumar has spent the last few months sifting through artwork of the maverick artist,who had rather limited solo exhibitions during his lifetime. The reasons,perhaps,are plenty: from his reticent persona to his absence from India at a time when the art mart was working towards creating an audience with an eye for art. Qadri left for foreign shores in 1965,handful of years after writer Mulk Raj Anand noticed his talent and invited the youngster from Phagwara to exhibit his work at Gandhi Bhavan,Punjab University Library,Chandigarh.

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If a 1962 oil on canvas with an apartment building painted with a multi-hued background represents his figurative yearning in his formative years,the 1973 oil impasto on canvas titled Shiv Shakti projects his love for the abstract genre. This was painted just few years after Qadri made Copenhagen his home,post his sojourns in East Africa,North America and Europe. The language of his art was to remain constant though tantra,that he was first introduced to at the age of seven,continued to be an integral part of his art,until his last. Speaking for him,are his works dipped in acid-free water and painted in deep hues in abstract patterns.