Sundaram Tagore Beverley Hills To Feature Adi Da Samraj Exhibition

Written by Gordon Chandler Saturday, 03 September 2011 22:22

Beverley Hills, CA. - The Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Beverley Hills is proud to present "Adi Da Samraj: Orpheus and Linead" on view from September 8th through October 8th. Adi Da Samraj is known for his monumental works meant to draw viewers into an ecstatic experience and connect them to a higher spiritual truth. Since his participation in the 2007 Venice Biennale, the late American-born artist has commanded a large international following. This exhibition, called Orpheus and Linead, curated by the renowned Italian critic and art historian Achille Bonito Oliva (director of the 45th Venice Biennale), comprises 7 works on aluminum. Each image is a geometric abstraction composed of the three primary colors and black and white. The exhibition originally premiered in September 2010 at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York.

Adi Da (1939-2008) graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1961 with a BA in philosophy and from Stanford University in 1966 with an MA in literature. His thesis was on modernism, Gertrude Stein, and painters of the same period. He began making art in the early 1960s, in the form of photography and calligraphic brush painting. In the last decade of his career, he worked to move beyond the single-point perspective that dominates the canon of Western art. By transcending single-point perspective, which he equated with egocentricism, he sought to invite viewers into a space devoid of ego. Curator Achille Bonito Oliva explains: “ The abstraction of Adi Da Samraj is anti-rhetorical and aspires to restore humanity to a state of contemplation and reflection….His abstract images look upon the world from beyond any point of view.” Over the course of his artistic career, Adi Da embraced technology, which he valued for the precision, aesthetic freedom, and non-painterliness it allowed. For this body of work, Adi Da began by photographing a chair, a bicycle, and a bird in flight. He then made digital compositions of geometric shapes inspired by his photographs. Once completed, the first drawing served as the basis for the next work as he sought to progressively abstract his images. Thus each subsequent image was a further distillation of the previous one.

Adi Da’s digital drawings were informed by a complex vocabulary of forms, colors, and spiritual concepts. He used two major visual elements in each work, which he called lineads and geomes. Lineads are hand-drawn gestural marks and curvilinear lines; geomes are solid geometric shapes. There is a momentum that takes place as the lineads uncoil upon the harmoniously positioned blocks of colors or the geomes. Together these forms unite to create a sense of dynamism and movement within the drawings. In the final stage of Adi Da’s unique process, the drawings were sent to a top fabrication studio to be transformed, in a painstaking and elaborate process, into large-scale works composed of lacquer pigment on aluminum. In addition to being an artist, Adi Da was a spiritual leader and prolific author on spiritual subjects. His work has been shown widely in Europe and the United States. Adi Da was the first contemporary artist to be given a solo exhibition by the city of Florence. In 2007, he was featured as an official solo collateral artist at the Venice Biennale. Recently his work was exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri.


Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music. Sundaram Tagore is a New York-based art historian and gallerist. A descendant of the influential poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, he promotes East-West dialogues through his contributions to numerous exhibitions as well as his eponymous galleries and their multicultural and multidisciplinary events. A candidate for a Doctorate of Philosophy from Oxford University, Tagore writes for numerous art publications. He was previously a director at Pace Wildenstein in New York. He has advised and worked with many international organizations including The Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice, Italy; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the United Nations. In 1999, he was nominated by Avenue magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Asian Americans in the United States. He has served as a juror for the 2002 UNESCO Design 21 competition and the Asian American Arts Center in New York. Recently, he was profiled on CNN International's Talk Asia. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.sundaramtagore.com

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