Salman Toor: How Will I Know?

For his first museum solo exhibition, Salman Toor (b. 1983) presents new and recent oil paintings. Known for his small-scale figurative works that combine academic technique and a quick, sketch-like style, Toor offers intimate views into the imagined lives of young, queer Brown men residing between New York City and South Asia. Recurring color palettes and references to art history heighten the emotional impact of Toor’s paintings and add a fantastical element to his narratives drawn from lived experience.

Lush interior scenes depict friends dancing, binge-watching television shows, playing with puppies, and gazing into their smartphones. In these idealistic settings, Toor’s figures are freed from the impositions placed upon them by the outside world. In contrast, his more muted tableaus highlight moments of passivity to convey nostalgia or alienation. One painting features a forlorn man whose possessions are on display for the scrutiny of airport security officers; another renders unspoken tensions around a family dinner table palpable. Taken as a whole, Toor’s paintings consider vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity.

Salman Toor: How Will I Know is organized by Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, and Ambika Trasi, curatorial assistant.

Sundaram Tagore is pleased to present an exhibition that brings together work by Sohan Qadri (1931 – 2011) and Neha Vedpathak (b. 1982), two Indian-born artists who push the boundaries of traditional media, transforming sheets of paper into richly colorful three-dimensional mediums.

The work in this exhibition highlights the intention behind Qadri and Vedpathak’s unique choice of material and their process-driven approaches. Both artists spent the early years of their careers experimenting with different media before turning to paper, which, while agile and responsive, can also be unforgiving and requires intense focus and skilled hands.

Qadri has been represented by the gallery since its inception in 2000. At the time, he was part of a select group of master artists who were outside the accepted Western cannon but were so obviously groundbreaking and working with a universal language, that it was critical to share with a wider audience. Since then, Qadri’s work has been acquired by museums and private collectors across the globe and in 2011, he was the subject of the monograph Sohan Qadri: The Seer, published by Skira Editore.

Though he spent much of his working life in Copenhagen, Denmark, Qadri grew up in northern India, where he was exposed to Sufism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. He was particularly inspired by Vajryana or Tantric Buddhism, which emphasizes the notion of sunyata or emptiness. In search of a process that would enable art-making while in a meditative state, Qadri found his spiritual medium in inks and dyes on paper, employing a distinctive technique of painting and carving that he would use for the rest of his life.

To begin his process, Qadri would bathe thick intaglio paper in acid-free water. Once it was swollen with liquid, he would score the surface with various gouging and cutting tools, carving in stages while applying inks and dyes. The serrated surfaces convey a sense of energy and rhythm. In the artist’s hands, the very nature of paper was transformed from a flat, two-dimensional surface into a vibrantly hued textile-like medium.

Neha Vedpathak is a Detroit-based artist who creates sculptural installations and wall reliefs made from paper. She was introduced to the Chelsea gallery in 2019, when she was selected by curator Betty Seid for the exhibition Alterations Activation Abstraction. Although she has only been exhibiting since 2006, Vedpathak has already received critical recognition from institutions such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, which acquired and exhibits her work across from celebrated artist Anish Kapoor.

Vedpathak began her career as a painter, creating minimalist abstract works on canvas, but like Qadri, she became restless and sought to move beyond the two-dimensional plane. After experimenting with different materials for a period of time, in 2009, she came across handmade Japanese paper, which eventually became the focus of her artistic investigations.

Using a rigorous self-developed technique, which she refers to as “plucking”, Vedpathak spends hours separating the paper’s fibers with a tiny pushpin. Similar to Qadri’s meditative state, there is a spiritual aspect to her slow and disciplined process, which she likens to meditative chanting tuned to a slower pace.

The resulting works resemble swaths of lace fabric, which she paints and sews into striking abstract compositions. Part painting, part collage, Vedpathak’s sensuous, tactile constructions seemingly float while casting intricate shadows on the wall. She creates depth with nuanced shifts of color and by leaving small areas of the composition unplucked, which plays off the subtle transparency of the lace-effect.

Having lived in multiple locations, including Pune, India, where she was born, Chicago, Phoenix, and now Detroit, Vedpathak’s practice is deeply inspired by her physical environment and she often draws from the natural world. Recently, however, she has started to incorporate architectural elements of the cityscape that surrounds her, referencing the abandoned structures and peeling paint of a city in constant flux, where widespread urban decay is undergoing a slow renewal.

Through her work, Vedpathak addresses contemporary social themes, including politics, cultural identity and economic disparity, yet, like Sohan Qadri, she also considers larger spiritual themes, exploring ideas of transformation and the cyclical nature of life.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

The late poet, painter and Tantric yogi Sohan Qadri was born in Chachoki, Punjab, India. In 1965, he left India and began a series of travels that took him to East Africa, North America and Europe. After settling in Copenhagen in the 1970s, Qadri participated in more than forty solo shows, in Mumbai, Vienna, Brussels, London, Oslo, Stockholm, Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York.

Qadri’s works are included in the British Museum, London; the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts; the Rubin Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; as well as the private collections of Cirque du Soleil, Heinrich Böll and Dr. Robert Thurman. In 2011, Skira Editore published the monograph Sohan Qadri: The Seer.

Neha Vedpathak was born in Pune, India, 1982. Her works have been shown at Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro North Carolina; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; and Centre d’Art Marnay Art Centre, France.

Ruby Chishti: The Tide Turns

Aicon Contemporary is proud to present The Tide Turns, a debut solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Ruby Chishti. The following excerpt is part of an essay written by Timothy Murray, director of the Cornell Council of the Arts.

This exquisite and compelling collection of fabric sculptures explores the artist’s lifelong experimentation in melding the materials of found garments and social memory.  Chishti’s haunting and enigmatic works, created between 2012 and 2020, perform the passage of fabric from discarded mass-produced and ceremonial clothing to the reconstructed filaments of artistic imagination.  For this exhibition, Chishti has carefully dissembled the fabrics of found clothing to produce recycled materials for her creative reweaving of memory and time.  As the artist systematically dissembles the clothing of unknown wearers, she passes the bodily traces and cultural spirit of those already touched by these filaments into vibrant sculptures that bear witness to the passage of custom and costume.  The material transformation of these fiberous specters of the unknown into architectonics of exquisite shape and haunting color bear the corporeal residue of the garments’ prior carriers, not to mention the artist’s creative manipulation and cultural memory. 

Bearing social and personal consequence, the exhibition provides an urgent template for conversation with the passage, persistence, and survival of time.  Much like the recycled fibers comprising them, these works accrue additive import across time.  They bear witness to the memory of the artist’s complex history of trauma, from unexpected family loss and the wanton destruction of her Pakistani home to the survival of migration and her persistence through transitional impediments.  Haunting the exhibition are the markings of the artist’s affection for the marble jaalis of home contrasted by the complex challenges faced by the artist in Pakistan, when the comforting material of family household was violently rendered into perilous rubble and ghostly dust. Now colorful stitchery and transcendent pattern transcend the darkness of trauma to bear the vibrant touch of artistic craft and the carriage of amassed imaginaries as these works pass from culture to culture, decade to decade.  From the trauma of displacement to the joys of resettlement and artistic creation, these spectral forms remain fraught as history now attests to the angst of ongoing struggles of migration and identity.

This provocative exhibition thus summons the participant to think both large and small, global and local.  Chishti’s refigured garments of passage directly challenge the heroics of colossal masculinity, from the confidence of patriarchy to the burden of war and the weight of exodus. In contrast, her huddled female figures, enveloped in the luxury of fabric, embody the touch of proximity and togetherness, the enfolding of internalization, and even the paradox of pensive affect.  The profusion of these miniaturized forms solicits something of the creativity of the feminist spirit and group endurance.  Similarly, when combined with the architectural shapes of her fabric hangings, the uncanny figures signal both a coming and a going via the distorted window frames hanging so gracefully in their precarity. The promising delicacy of life and presence sit vibrantly on the thresholds of Chishti’s artistic environments.

As evinced from the sound field emanating from “A Ruin Without a People,” Chishti’s stunning exhibition testifies to the cross-cultural spirit of her fabric art as well as to the transformative interface of artistic duration.

Over the last 20 years, Ruby Chishti has produced a series of lyrical sculptures and installations that touch on tenacity and fragility of human existence, migration, Islamic myths, gender politics, memory, universal theme of love, loss and of being human.

Born in 1963 in Jhang, Pakistan, Chishti is primarily a representational sculptor, she was formally educated at the National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan. Ruby has held residencies internationally, she has received fellowships and awards including recent VSC/Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. Her installations, sculptures, and sitespecific works have been exhibited at Asia Society Museum NY, Queens Museum, rossi & rossi Hong Kong, Aicon Gallery (London & New York), Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India, Arco Madrid, Art Hong Kong, India Art fair and The Armory Show NYC to name a few. Chishti’s work has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers and books including Unveiling the visible by Salima Hashmi, Memory-Metaphor-Mutations by Salima Hashmi and Yashodhra Dalmia and The eye still seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art by Salima Hashmi & Matand Khosla.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Sita And Rama: The Ramayana In Indian Painting

Created between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries for the Rajput and Pahari courts of north India, the paintings in this exhibition capture the collective imagination of the Ramayana, an epic narrative composed by the Sanskrit poet Valmiki around the fifth century B.C. Accompanied by a number of textiles from across South Asia, the artworks illustrate the hero Rama’s rescue of his beloved wife, Sita, after her abduction by Ravana, an evil demon with ten heads. The philosophical dimension of the story finds visual expression in these images, particularly its interest in the themes of morality, kingship, and Rama’s status as a divine manifestation (or avatar) of Vishnu. Highlights include an important group of paintings from the early Punjab Hills Shangri/Mankot Ramayana series.

Rotation 1: August 10, 2019–February 23, 2020
Rotation 2: February 27, 2019–August 30, 2020