Sohan Qadri - Life in Copenhagen

Life in Copenhagen

Copenhagen, tranquil in comparison to larger cities like Paris or New York, proved an ideal place in which to create his serene, meditative art forms. Qadri initially lived with the chairman of the Danish Art Society, Dr. Kaj Borck; however, because he arranged to have several exhibitions at once, he required a studio. Borck’s daughter introduced Qadri to Dr. Fritz Schimitto, an eccentric aristocrat who lived by himself in a large villa. Schimitto was an economist in the Danish Ministry who had worked in the same office, from the same chair, for thirty-five years, calculating Denmark’s per-capita income. He was unusually introverted and had little contact with anyone since the death of his mother two years earlier.

The villa, located in the Hellerup area of Copenhagen next to the Indian embassy, was filled with free-flying birds, fish, dogs and turtles. In one of the many dust-covered upper rooms was a giant toy train and in another, Schimitto’s mother’s clothes, laid out just as they were the day she died. Schimitto asked only where Qadri was from, what his profession was and whether he could paint in the villa’s odd surroundings. When Qadri said he could, Schimitto invited him to stay, and Qadri did, except for brief periods, for eighteen years.

In 1973, a few years after settling in Copenhagen, Qadri met another of his most important patrons, Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll. He was introduced to the celebrated writer during a show at the Bodo Galuab Gallery in Cologne, Germany. Böll bought several paintings and wrote about Qadri’s work. Also during this period Qadri, along with American psychedelic painter Linda Wood and Pere Bacho, took over an old gun factory and help found the free city called Christianna which still exists in Copenhagen. In the spirit of the times, everything belonged to everyone in Christianna. There was little privacy and hashish was freely available. Although he enjoyed the openness, it was an impossible environment in which to work. Six months later, Qadri returned to Hellerup, where he stayed until Dr. Shimitto’s death in 1986. He eventually moved into government-sponsored artists’ housing where he lives today.

Though he continued to produce works on canvas, by the mid-1970s, paper was Qadri’s preferred medium. “I was perpetually seeking a medium where effort is superfluous. Deep states of being are not brought out by effort,” he says. His work, he says, is not philosophical—it is not supposed to excite the thinking process. On the contrary, his aim is to arrest the thought process, as in meditation, which Qadri practices daily and teaches.

Qadri’s works are largely monochromatic surfaces which he penetrates with punctures and serrations. The Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has described his dots and striations as “lustrous bubbles of energy.” Qadri transforms paper with these markings making it into a three-dimensional surface. Despite the fact that he lives in Northern Europe, a sense of Indian ethos pervades his art. His colors are luminous—Sindoori reds, peacock blues, intense oranges, even heavy blacks and grays—and distinctly Indian. Colors fade and seep through the paper. The vibrations created by the colors are endless and break the boundary between the inner space of the image and the external space of the viewer.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Qadri’s artistic productivity grew and he was invited to have exhibitions in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Nairobi, New Delhi, Bombay, Singapore and New York. Although he never married, he helped raise his three children with two partners, one a Keralite Christian and the other a Finn. It was also during this time that he began to plan a spiritual earth art project, a gyan stambha or knowledge stupa, located on an ancient trading route in the Punjab in India. The structure, which will eventually occupy several acres of land, will be devoted to knowledge and peace. Construction of the stupa is in progress. Along with creating his art, Qadri has continued to teach meditation throughout Scandinavia to advanced students.

Qadri’s has successfully straddled disparate cultures throughout his career. “I did not want to confine myself to one place, nation or community,” he says. “My approach to life has been universal, and so is my art.”