Sohan Qadri - European Sojourn

European Sojourn

After his stay in Africa, Qadri went to Zurich. A former girlfriend arranged for him to house sit for a friend, an architect named Jorge Plangg. Qadri and Plangg formed a bond, and Plangg gave him the keys to an associate’s colossal villa called Tilgenkamp. At Tilgenkamp, Qadri prepared for his first European exhibition, held in November 1966 at the Gallerie Romain Louis in Brussels. The exhibition was arranged with the help of respected Swiss art critic Mark Kuhn; yet, of the twenty-three paintings exhibited, only one sold.

Although he had little money, Qadri continued to paint. One day, Kuhn asked Qadri to join him while he interviewed the surrealist painter René Magritte in the artist’s studio. After introductions, Qadri sat quietly while they talked, looking at Magritte’s seminal canvas Ceci n’est pas une pipe sitting on the artist’s easel. After a few hours, Magritte announced that it was his chess time, and that Kuhn should come back the following day to finish the interview. When Qadri told him he’d been a chess champion in Simla, Magritte challenged him to a game, and then quickly beat him.

Before driving with Kuhn from Brussels to Paris to meet Qadri’s first patron, Mulk Raj Anand, and the Indian painter Syed Haider Raza, Qadri sold five paintings to a couple from Montreal who were on their way back to Canada to open a gallery. Once in Paris, he secured an important exhibition in December 1966 at the Gallerie Arnaud alongside major European artists including Pierre Soulages, George Michaux, Jean Paul Riepal and Louis Fatoux. Seven years later, he would show his works at Arnaud’s sister gallery in Montreal.

When he returned to Zurich, Qadri received an invitation to an international artists’ camp in Kushalin, Poland, where he was given lodging, food and painting materials for two months. The Souks Museum of Modern Art in Kushalin acquired one of the paintings he produced during this period. Next to his studio were two Danish artists, painter Bent Kock, and printmaker Helle Thorborg, who were impressed with Qadri’s work. In 1969, Thorborg arranged for him to visit Copenhagen, through the Danish cultural ministry.

Before going to Copenhagen, Qadri showed his work in Vienna at the gallery Uni Generation and at the Government Printing Press called d’Orchai. He also showed in Munich at Stenzel Gallerie and stayed for a period in 1968 in Paris where he rented American artist Mimi Vaz’s studio in Villa d’Essai. There he mixed with Pierre Soulages and James Michaux, whom he had met at the Arnaud Gallerie, along with the Indian artists Syed Haider Raza, Anjolie Ela Menon, N. Vishwanadhan, and Nikita Narayan. He also met well-known printmaker Krishna Reddy who was working with his wife, Judy Reddy and the British painter Stanley William Hayter.

During this time, Qadri stopped painting with impasto oil on canvas and experimented with paper. Though the oils sold well, paper, he felt, was softer, more feminine, and more suited to works that evolved out of a meditative state. “Deep states of being are not brought out by effort,” he says. “When I work with ink and dyes, I don’t have to fight with the canvas. There are no brush strokes, no painter. The aura of the form is the painting.”

While in Paris, the Danish Ministry of Culture offered Qadri a show, including traveling expenses and a stipend. The ministry’s gallery director bought a painting, as did New Yorker Sam Kanner of Court Gallerie. Christian Oberg, from the graphic department of Denmark’s Louisiana Museum, bought several paintings and arranged five exhibitions for Qadri in Denmark.