Sundaram Tagore Gallery is pleased to present NEXT LEVEL, an exhibition of 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.
To decree that all artists should have a purpose would be limiting, but a noble one would be 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 that each of us can connect with. They use the forms of color, nature and space to lay out a common language that one can understand on an intuitive level, bypassing the blockages of intellectual prejudice.
One of the artists included in the show 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 when 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. The art critic and scholar Donald Kuspit wrote of Qadri, " he is the pre-eminent aesthetic mystic of modernism." Qadri has held over forty one-man shows throughout the world. His works are included in the collections of National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, India; the Peabody Essex Museum in Essex, Massachussetts; as well as in the private collections of Dr. Robert Thurman and Heinrich Böll.
Stan Gregory begins his paintings with reproductions of photographs from magazines and newspapers, then blots out all recognizable imagery, leaving a looping signature framework that is at once spare and playfully rococo. In the markings and lines, reminiscent of a forgotten language, one can see Gregory's influences of the patternings of illuminated manuscripts, the modernist tradition of Geometric Abstraction, as well as Islamic and Japanese calligraphic traditions. Gregory was born in born in 1961 in Tallahassee, Florida. His work is in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, New York; the Chase Manhattan Bank collection, New York, New York; the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, New York; as well as the Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, New York
