Frieze Seoul 2024

curatorial note

Steeped in sacred iconography particular to the Indian artist, Sohan Qadri (1932-2011), whose practice in Copenhagen brought him international renown, the ink and dye works represent the artist’s modernist vocabulary—minimalist, rendered in vibrant colours, with a tactile dimensionality that established him as a twentieth century painter whose legacy has impacted viewers around the world. Perhaps no other Indian artist has been as widely collected as Sohan Qadri.

Invoking a vision of meditative tranquillity, Sohan Qadri—who was born in India’s Punjab and travelled extensively through the Himalayas, Africa and Europe before settling in Denmark—emerged as a pivotal abstractionist whose vividly dyed paper paintings were anchored in beliefs of meditation and transcendence. Critics saw in these works an affinity with the principles of tantra, a discipline he pursued not only in theory but equally as a practitioner.

Qadri’s preferred medium was paper for its ability to absorb colour densities that helped him express ascending or descending auras of energy, reflecting his interest in breath as a tool to help facilitate meditative practices. Sheets of paper would be scratched or pierced with sharp tools to create a tactile surface symbolising his understanding of India’s sacred philosophies. Having begun his career painting with oils on canvas, from the 1970s onwards his tactile engagement with paper helped turn the two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional medium. In responding to the endless possibilities of these etched surfaces, Qadri served as a conduit between the tangible and the intangible, an artist whose colour abstractions remain at the forefront of visual memory as leading examples of abstract art born from an inherent Indian tradition.