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“Next Level” highlights the breadth of international artists that the Sundaram Tagore Gallery represents. Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s mission is to create a cross-cultural dialogue among its art and artists, and with artwork from India, America, Israel and Japan, it achieves that goal. This show achieves something more than just a feel-good, pan-global display of art, however—running through the work is a current or vibration of (rare in this jaded art world) joy. It is refreshing to find work that can convey such positive emotion without ever falling into the pitfalls of cliché or banality. |
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Next Level – Emily Auchincloss & Sundaram
“Next Level” highlights the breadth of international artists that the Sundaram Tagore Gallery represents. Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s mission is to create a cross-cultural dialogue among its art and artists, and with artwork from India, America, Israel and Japan, it achieves that goal. This show achieves something more than just a feel-good, pan-global display of art, however—running through the work is a current or vibration of (rare in this jaded art world) joy. It is refreshing to find work that can convey such positive emotion without ever falling into the pitfalls of cliché or banality. Here one can find artists grappling with how to connect our world’s warring, disparate and lonely population with a common thread. The artists chosen for this exhibition have a way of using the infinite to convey something immediate, personal and alive, common to all who exist in the human condition. They use the forms of color, nature and space to make a common language that one can understand on an intuitive level, bypassing intellectual and social prejudice.
One of the artists of note is Sohan Qadri. His lush and transcendent works recall the palette and spiritual cornucopia of India, Qadri’s homeland. Raised part Hindu and part Sikh, the artist was also involved with Sufism while growing up. His art is informed by this spiritual journey, and particularly by his practices as a Vajrayana Buddhist and yogi. His paintings are monochrome surfaces of dye on paper with repeated striations and scorings that convey the rhythmic expressions of color energies. His works show an artist who has a deeper understanding of the complexities of life to convey his message with such simplicity. Qadri has held over 40 one-man shows throughout the world, and his works are included in the collections of National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. As with most Contemporary Indian Art, but not without reason, Qadri’s prices are rising rapidly.
Another standout is Stan Gregory, an artist who plays with line to affect a language of markings that are at once elusive and telling. It is as if he climbed into the alphabet, unbending all the letters until they were no longer recognizable, laughing as we realize that once there is no “right” way to read these marks a deeper meaning is conveyed. Having studied painting in Southern Florida, with a stint at the avant-garde and renowned Palm Press in Tampa, Gregory’s influences include the patternings of illuminated manuscripts, the modernist tradition of Geometric Abstraction and Islamic and Japanese calligraphic traditions. With his work included in the Guggenheim Museum in New York as well as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gregory stands to receive increased attention for his unique synthesis of the spiritual and of pop art.
The show includes works by gallery artists Natvar Bhavsar, Stan Gregory, Fré Ilgen, Nathan Slate Joseph, Vittorio Matino, Judith Murray, Michael Petry, Hiroshi Senju, Joan Vennum, Sohan Qadri, Anil Revri, Merrill Wagner, Lee Waisler, Susan Weil and Betty Weiss.
