Art & Photography > Art Events & Exhibitions > Sundaram Tagore Gallery: Solo


Orpheus and Linead: Solo Exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York City (September 9 - October 9, 2010) — The New York City gallery premiere of Adi Da's Image-Art. Curated by internationally acclaimed art critic and art historian, Achille Bonito Oliva.


Sundaram Tagore Gallery
547 West 27th Street
New York, New York 10001

The catalog for this exhibition is available from The Dawn Horse Press.  

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Press Release from The Sundaram Tagore Gallery

SUNDARAM TAGORE NEW YORK PRESENTS
ADI DA SAMRAJ’S WORK, CURATED BY ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA

New York, July 27, 2010—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 11 works on aluminum. Each image is a geometric abstraction composed of the three primary colors and black and white. The works in the series reinterpret the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and it features several works that have never been shown publicly.

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.

Orpheus and Linead is accompanied by a catalogue, which includes an essay by Achille Bonito Oliva.


The Sundaram Tagore Gallery After Opening Night(click pictures for enlargement)










The Sundaram Tagore Gallery: Opening Night (September 9, 2010)(click pictures for enlargement)










The Sundaram Tagore Gallery: Press Preview (September 8, 2010)(click pictures for enlargement)


(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)





(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)



Achille Bonito Oliva, Teresa Romero, and Stuart Gibson
(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)


Achille Bonito Oliva, Teresa Romero, and Stuart Gibson
(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)


Achille Bonito Oliva speaking to the press


Opening remarks from Sundaram Tagore, Stuart Gibson, Achille Oliva and Stanley Hastings (with Teresa Romero translating for Achille)


Achille Bonito Oliva and Sundaram Tagore
(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)


Sundaram Tagore and Achille Bonito Oliva


Sundaram Tagore and Achille Bonito Oliva
(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)


Sandy Kemper (from the Kemper Museum), Linda Nicholson, Brad Nicholson, Sundaram Tagore


(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)


(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)

 

The Sundaram Tagore Gallery Before Opening(click pictures for enlargement)




(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)



(photo courtesy of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery)



Orpheus and Linead: The Image-Art

Adi Da’s digital drawings are informed by a complex vocabulary of forms, colors, and spiritual concepts. He uses two major visual elements in each work, which he calls 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.


(click pictures for enlargement)


Eurydice One: The Illusory Fall of The Bicycle Into The Sub-Atomic Parallel Worlds of Primary Color and Point of View - Part Three: The Abstract Narative In Geome and Linead (Second Stage) - III, 4 (Diptych)
2007, 2010 Lacquer on aluminum 96 x 200"




Eurydice One: The Illusory Fall of The Bicycle Into The Sub-Atomic Parallel Worlds of Primary Color and Point of View - Part Three: The Abstract Narrative In Geome and Linead (Second Stage) - 1, 2
2007, 2010 Lacquer on aluminum 96 x 96"




The Spiritual Descent of The Bicycle Becomes the Second-Birth of Flight:
Part Twelve - II, 4

2007, 2010 Lacquer on aluminum 60 x 60"




Eurydice One: The Illusory Fall of The Bicycle Into The Sub-Atomic Parallel Worlds of Primary Color and Point of View - Part Three: The Abstract Narrative in Geome and Linead (Second Stage) - V, 2
2007, 2010 Lacquer on aluminum 72 x 72"




Eurydice One: The Illusory Fall of The Bicycle Into The Sub-Atomic Parallel Worlds of Primary Color and Point of View - Part Three: The Abstract Narrative In Geome and Linead (Second Stage) - 1, 2
2007, 2010 Lacquer on aluminum 96 x 96"




The Spiritual Descent of The Bicycle Becomes the Second-Birth of Flight:
Part Eleven - VIII
2007, 2008 Lacquer on aluminum 72 x 71"



Preparing for the Exhibition


 



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Quotations from and/or photographs of Avatar Adi Da Samraj used by permission of the copyright owner:
© Copyrighted materials used with the permission of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. None of these materials may be disseminated or otherwise used for any non-personal purpose without the prior agreement of the copyright owner. ADIDAM is a trademark of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as Trustee for the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

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