Om Prakash: Intuitive Nature

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition OM PRAKASH: INTUITIVE NATURE PAINTINGS FROM 2004 TO 2015 curated by Patricia Watts for the Marin Community Foundation Novato, California September 21, 2016 –January 13, 2017 Special thanks to Justyn Zolli for introducing the work of Om Prakash to the Marin Community Foundation, and to Anuradha Vikram for the main catalogue essay.

Photography by Parvesh Publication designed by Jasmine Moorhead Printed by Greenerprinter, Point Richmond, CA Artwork © 2016 Om Prakash Introduction © 2016 Patricia Watts Essay © 2016 Anuradha Vikram

Fall 2016 marks the fourteenth exhibition I have organized for the Marin Community Foundation since 2012. Most of the shows have focused on environmental themes and, more recently, on mature and underrecognized artists of the North Bay Area. This exhibition, Om Prakash: Intuitive Nature, is not explicitly environmental, nor does it consist of work made by an artist from the Bay Area. However, the opportunity emerged because of my recent friendship with Justyn Zolli, a San Francisco painter. Zolli—who is a protégé of Prakash and has spent time with the painter at his home studio in New Delhi—sought my advice last year on venues for a solo exhibition of the artist’s paintings. He then introduced me to Yogesh, Prakash’s son, who has lived in San Francisco for several years. I was struck by Prakash’s emPatricia phasis on the cosmic and by the maturity of his oeuvre, and together we decided to stage his first monographic exhibition in the United States.

who were influenced by Eastern philosophies.

John Anderson, Richard Bowman, and Jesse Reichek come to mind with their abstract “inner worlds,” visualized by geometric forms, spirals, starbursts, and auras.

While doing research on Prakash for this catalogue, I was delighted to learn that he was one of eight artists selected by the late California painter Lee Mullican for the exhibition Neo-Tantra: Contemporary Indian Painting Inspired by Tradition, presented at the UCLA Galleries in 1985–86.

Mullican—who lived in the Bay Area from 1946 to 1952, before joining the UCLA art faculty in 1962—was part of the 1951 exhibition Dynaton, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and including the other mystical abstract paintWatts ers Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford.

These artists were exemplars of the Bay Area interest in self-transcending awareness steeped in Eastern philosophy, and in Surrealism as well. The Neo-Tantra exhibition at UCLA presented a contemporary movement of modern Indian painters who built upon their own culture to develop mature styles focusing on nature, spirit, and the universe. Almost thirty-five years later, Om Prakash has proven himself to be deeply committed to the path of Indian Modernist abstraction incorporating a pure visual language to convey his personal or inner knowledge about the unity of all existence.

OM PRAKASH An Introduction

In my travels to art fairs over the last two years, I would see Prakash’s paintings at Art Market San Francisco at Fort Mason and at Art on Paper at Pier 36 in New York at art dealer Evan Morganstein’s booth, Gallery Sam. Even before I met Zolli, I would introduce myself to Morganstein to let him know that I thought Prakash’s paintings were fresh and meditative while formally intriguing. The paintings reminded me of the work of a few North Bay painters of the 1950s and 1960s,

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Earlier in his life, Prakash spent time in the to additional US venues in 2017 and beyond, United States—a critical period that has and the works will be incorporated into the greatly inf luenced his work. He was awardfamily’s private collection, to remain in the ed a Fulbright scholarship to attend graduate United States indefinitely. studies in fine art and art history at Columbia University and the Art Students League For the main catalogue essay, I sought a writ(1964–66). While living in New York City, he er who could expound on Prakash’s paintings became acquainted with many well-known abfrom an Eastern perspective within American stract artists, including Robert Motherwell, culture, someone who could address abstracMark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Philip Gustion through a multinational lens. I was aware ton, Jasper Johns, John of curator and writer AnCage, Paul Jenkins, and uradha Vikram through Frank Stella. Upon his her curatorial projects return to India, he conwhile she taught at UC tinued teaching at New Berkeley from 2009 to Delhi’s School of Plan2013 and worked at the ning and Architecture, Worth Ryder Art Galfrom 1961-1981, and was lery there, and aware the Principal of the Colalso of her more recent lege of Art from 1981position as Artistic Di1992. He has traveled rector at the 18th Street throughout Europe and Arts Complex in Santa Asia, where he sought Monica. Vikram’s interto experience the great ests include transnationworks of art. His interal futurism and theories est in Indian classical on globalization, as well music and his decades of as critical race discourse experience playing sitar in modern and contemhave also greatly inf lu- Om Prakash. Energy Gate. 2007. Acrylic on porary art history. enced his art. In addition canvas, 43 x 38 inches. to his painting practice, It has been a pleasure to Prakash has also made work with Om Prakash collages, drawings, and life-size sculptures. and his family to bring his vital work to the attention of the San Francisco Bay Area. It The selection of eighty paintings and eight is with great pleasure that we offer this exdrawings for this exhibition was made from hibition and catalogue to continue an ongothe artist’s website. The works were shipped ing dialogue about the Eastern inf luences on from India by water freight across the IndiAmerican geometric and abstract art. an and Atlantic Oceans, then trucked from New York to Oakland over the summer. Om PATRICIA WATTS Prakash: Intuitive Nature is available to travel Consulting Curator

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“I am not a Tantrik. Because I cannot relive the life of more than two thousand years and I do not follow and believe in its rituals, gestures, and life style. But I am also enormously fascinated by the graphic manifestations and devoted discipline of Tantra Art. Its Mandalas, Yantras, and Tankhas.”—Om Prakash

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“Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. ...Those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.”

—Carl Sagan

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Energy radiates through the paintings of Om Prakash. Color and line pulsate with vitality. Prakash channels the life-forces within and around himself into paintings whose precise geometries hover between abstraction and representation. With his cohort of “Neo-Tantra” artists, active in India since the 1960s, Prakash has synthesized ancient South Asian visual and spiritual traditions with the pictorial and formal values of mid-century Modernism in the United States and Europe, and other global traditions such as Chinese ink painting. While the artist is a student of Tantric painting traditions, he incorporates these forms alongside the teachings of nonobjective painting into a distinctly personal lexicon of shapes and symbols.

The dialogue between twentieth-century Modernism and Tantric painting in Prakash’s work plays out visually in two starkly different works, Mystery of Trees (2005; p. 14) and Epiphany of Black (2007; p. 20). In Mystery of Trees, Prakash abandons the stylings of Neo-Tantra, with its deep color values and concentric, inscribed geometries, in favor of an allover composition in pastel greens, pinks, blues, and yellows. The resulting image is a geometric primavera, drawing parallels with the line and color work of Paul Klee. Flat and patterned like a scrim, the painted surface opens just enough to suggest an early morning light filtering through the tall trunks of a forest. In Epiphany of Black, Prakash evokes the black-on-black crosses of Ad Reinhardt and the resonant squares of Josef Albers. Deep red pulsates from the painting’s center, framed by rich blues and soft purples. Squares and rectangles radiate outward with a muted rhythm.

The deep black surface Vikram recedes and colorful geometries advance, conveying a breathable stillness.

Both works are marked by the luminosity that is Prakash’s signature, whether in the prismatic sunset vista of Orange Light (2009; p. 23), or glimpsed obliquely in the off-kilter Counterpoint Mandala (2012; p. 36).

PAINTING AS A CONDUCTOR:

Prakash is known primarily as a practitioner of a uniquely Indian visual style, and his work as an artist and influence as an arts educator has been centered in New Delhi for much of his six-decade Anuradha career. His interests are nevertheless international, and Prakash locates himself within a tradition including spiritually minded artists such as Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Kasimir Malevich. Thanks to a postgraduate fellowship at Columbia University in the mid-1960s, he was able to meet some of these luminaries and compare notes at a formative point in his artistic development. To understand his approach in totality, one must apprehend the universally translatable elements and the culturally and personally specific aspects of the work simultaneously.

The Art of Om Prakash

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Born in 1932, Prakash was fifteen years old at the time of India’s independence, and he came of age among a generation of young Indians who sought to define the newly postcolonial nation through culture—specifically, renewed interest

in South Asian classical arts. For Prakash, who plays the sitar, this came to include the Hindu raga, a tone poem with religious reverberations that also marks the weather or the time of day.

Rain tones prevail in Prakash’s Tilak Malhar (2015; p. 58). Circles inscribed within squares in the traditional mandala pattern double as raindrops and as moons in different phases. The blues of the painting’s surface are marbled with textures of wetness. This painting communicates the sensation of a cool summer rain in the garden, contrasted against deep floral tones and luminous greens. Still, there is more to the invocation than mere resemblance. Circles within circles offer a cyclical or calendrical reading in which the passage of time and the phases of life and death are revealed. Circular Spectrum (2013; p. 44) reflects the first drops of rain splashing into a mandala of concentric ripples that expand infinitely into space. As did the Cubists, Prakash represents many moments in time and space simultaneously.

At the same time, the raga proposes possibilities for painting that Western Modernism generally has not. This is music composed with intention to not only reflect the specific season and time at which it is performed but also to inIn the Western tradition, form and influence that this power to affect other moment of performance bodies across a distance on a metaphysical level. A Om Prakash. Mystery of Trees. 2005. Acrylic on through art is known as Malhar, or rain raga, does canvas, 55 x 40 inches. phenomenology. German not simply celebrate the Romantic theorist Edmonsoons: the song has the potential to bring mund Husserl introduced this secular concept, the rain. In the Tantric painting tradition, imderived from Hindu and Buddhist transcendenages are also invested with affective power. A tal philosophies, into European discourse in the lexicon of geometric forms represents specific late nineteenth century.1 Modernist painters spiritual aspects, deities, and principles which including Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes can be brought to bear on the viewer’s mental Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman and physical state, thanks to the artist’s act of hinted at phenomenology with their use of colfocusing those energies. or fields and of contrasts that trigger physical

Though Prakash is a Modernist painter, motivated by a personal artistic vision, and not a religious artist, his work is underpinned by considerable knowledge of Tantric philosophy.

Certain principles prevail: the order of the universe is in all things, and in all things the underlying structures are the same. Change is a circle, stability a square. Male is an upward thrust, female plunges down. Harmony, balance, and illumination are virtues. Action and inaction are equal and opposite forces. Ego is absent. Mandala— Union of Opposites (2012; p. 37) articulates these principles through a colorful grid of squares and triangles, incorporating tones Massimiliano Gioni’s from light to dark and 2015 Venice Biennale colors across the speclinked a Tantric tradition trum into a diverse and of devotional painting, harmonious composition. anchored in the northern Here again, ephemeral state of Rajasthan, with light emanates from the early twentieth-centuwork’s core. The mandala ry European Spiritualist of squares might read viartists such as Hilma af 3 sually as a field of pixels, Klint. While this cona quilt, a chess board, or nection is viable, it is incomplete without the Om Prakash. Mandala—Union of Opposites. one of Sol LeWitt’s iterative grids. Indeed, iterainclusion of Prakash and 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. tion—repetition that behis peers, such as G. R. gets change—is central Santosh and S. H. Raza. to the Tantric vision of the universe.

These twentieth-century South Asian artists pioneered a contemporary tradition of ModernAmong the great proponents of iteration was ist, metaphysical, phenomenological paintings Josef Albers, whose signature series Homage which originated from an urban perspective on to the Square is likely to be more recognizable South Asia. Furthermore, they operate within to an American audience. Parallels between systems of artistic training, agency, authorship, Albers and Prakash are not limited to their and economics on the same footing as Western shared dedication to teaching. The two artists artists—a claim that cannot be made of the Rarepresent different understandings of related jasthani Tantric painters whose work circulates ideas, translated through two distinct cultural as anonymous “folk art.”

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Musical influences infuse the visual rhythms of his paintings. Music is a consistent source of inspiration for twentiethcentury Modernist painters, whether it be Kandinsky incorporating Stravinsky, or Stuart Davis channeling American jazz. Music operates similarly in Prakash’s paintings, inspiring an undulating rhythm of color and line.

effects in the viewer’s eye or recede into dialogue with the walls behind. American artists since the 1960s—most notably the group identified with Land Art and the Light and Space movement—have explored “the expanded field” of phenomenology in sculpture and site-specific installation.2 Still, it is only recently that these ideas have gained traction in painting discourse. Spiritual and metaphysical questions in painting are likewise not new, but they are newly taken seriously—though not always consistently so. Perhaps the global conversation has finally caught up with Prakash.

traditions. The use of the square in Prakash’s tongue-in-cheek Selfie 2 (2014) makes that clear. Prakash’s “selfie” is a nonobjective grid of concentric squares, graded from white to deep yellow, then pale purple. This work demonstrates Albers’s theory of color interactions, though Prakash has arrived at his perceptual effects through his study of the South Asian Tantric tradition. Prakash’s squares are embedded in a larger, dark red square, highlighted by a square cruciform, in bright reds, greens and pinks.

The surrounding pattern makes subtle reference to a distinctly South Asian tradition of drawing and painting as anchored to architectural space.

stop, contemplate, and open our minds to unseen possibilities of art and experience. The viewer may experience a charge.

ANURADHA VIKRAM Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator, and Artistic Director at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. She writes frequently for the art publications X-TRA, Daily Serving, Hyperallergic, and Artillery. Vikram holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from New York University. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Public Practice program at Otis College of Art and Design, and has curated over 40 exhibitions and residencies in non-profit, academic, and commercial venues.

A teacher of art for many decades, as well as a faculty member and administrator at the College of Art, New Delhi, Om Prakash has outlined the four categories of artistic Notes: expression as they cor1. David Woodruff Smith, respond to yogic princi- Om Prakash. Selfie 2. 2014. Acrylic on canvas, “Phenomenology,” The ples. These are: physical, 28 x 28 inches.

Stanford Encyclopedia of intellectual, emotional, Philosophy (Winter 2013 and spiritual. ImportantEdition), Edward N. Zalta ly, Prakash stipulates that only the first three (ed.), URL=<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ categories can be achieved through the artist’s win2013/entries/phenomenology/>. intention, plan, and action. The spiritual may reveal itself, or it may not. One can therefore 2. Krauss, Rosalind, “Sculpture in the Expanded think of Prakash’s extensive body of work, Field,” October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 30–44. spanning over six decades of prodigious output, as a daily practice of seeking. With each 3. Gioni, Massimiliano, “The Encyclopedic Palace,” painting, the artist creates a circuit to conduct 55th Venice Biennale, 2013, URL = <http://www. metaphysical action. Having created the conlabiennale.org/doc_files/presskit-55iae10.pdf>. ditions for new visions, he now invites us to

LIGHT OF TRIANGLES TO CIRCLE

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MANDALA OF ECHO

AMPLITUDE

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MYSTERY OF TREES

VERTICAL GLOW

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ACME OF GREEN

RADIANT FORMATION

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APPENDAGE

STEP BY STEP

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EPIPHANY OF BLACK

EXTENDED SHADOWS

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CENTRAL CHORD 2

ORANGE LIGHT

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BEATIFIC MAGENTA

BLUE EQUANIMITY

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OUTER WORLD 2

SWAR MANDALA

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MANDALA OF FESTIVITY

COMITY

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GREEN MANIFESTATION

JOY

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ENTRANCE FOR COSMOS

AWAKENING

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INVOCATION MANDALA

MANDALA OF ENSHRINEMENT

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COUNTERPOINT MANDALA

MANDALAâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;UNION OF OPPOSITES

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MOMENTOUS

JOY MANDALA II

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SANCTUARY OF SQUARES

ELEGANCE

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SHADOW OF A WINDOW

MANDALA OF PURPLE NIGHT

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CIRCULAR SPECTRUM 1

MANDALA OF WHITE STAR

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SELFIE

SELFIE 2

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PETALS

THE GREEN SEASON

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MANDALA OF BONDAGE I

MANDALA OF BONDAGE II

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EQUILIBIRUM

MANDALA OF SEEKING

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SINDOORA MANDALA

MANDALA BINDI-BINDU

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RANGBHOOMI MANDALA 3

RANGBHOOMI MANDALA 4

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TILAK MALHAR

IMPLOSION MANDALA

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MANDALA OF ELEGANCE

SUMMER

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