Art & Photography > Art Events & Exhibitions > Galerie Pien Rademakers 2014

May 24 - June 29, 2014

June 4 - 9, 2014

click to enlarge

I am not only intrigued, but thrilled about this art. It has to be discovered. I think it is so powerful — so beautiful. Once it is discovered, I think it could be a worldwide success.

Paul van Vliet
cabaret artist and UNICEF ambassador

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 24, 4:00pm - 6:00pm

From May 24 to June 29, 2014, Galerie Pien Rademakers presents the solo exhibition Quandra Loka - The Indivisible Space of Conscious Light, the world premiere of this large-scale limited edition color photographic work by Adi Da Samraj. The exhibition will include seven new color Quandra Loka fabrications, and a multi-media projection featuring images in the exhibition projected at monumental scale. The exhibition will also be on display at the KunstRAI Art Fair in Amsterdam, June 4-9, 2014.

A preview of the full exhibition:

A preview of the multi-media installation:

The multi-media projection installation fills the back wall of the gallery, and loops every eight minutes. The theme of the installation is also the subtitle of the exhibition: “The Indivisible Space of Conscious Light”. The exhibition art works are featured in the multi-media installation, and are presented in a manner that conveys the artist’s message that the imagery, and in fact the entire world, exists in an “Indivisible Space of Conscious Light”.

Sections on this page:

The Quandra Loka Suite
Galerie Pien Rademakers
KunstRAI Art Fair 2014
The Quandra Loka Exhibition

The Quandra Loka Suite

The primary use of image-art is perceptual feeling-participation in the totality of the meaning-space that the image-art is. Indeed, that is why image-art should be made. Image-art should and must be made, because it enables human beings to participate in human existence in a right, true, and, potentially, profound sense.

Adi Da Samraj

Adi Da describes the Quandra Loka Suite as being of "indefinite length". It is a vast Suite comprised of over 21,000 images. Here are just a few.

Click on images to view enlargements.

Quandra Loka 2003_42_05A
© 2014 ASA

Quandra Loka 2003_46_25
© 2014 ASA

Quandra Loka 2003_51_13A
© 2014 ASA

Quandra Loka 2003_28_01A
© 2014 ASA

Quandra Loka #02716
© 2014 ASA

Quandra Loka #04512
© 2014 ASA

Quandra Loka #114
© 2014 ASA

Quandra Loka — a suite of interrelated photographs with a single overarching subject matter — was created by Adi Da in 2002-2003. Quandra Loka represents the pinnacle of Adi Da's photographic method. Almost all of the images in this suite are complex multiple exposures, typically involving more than two (and even as many as ten or more) superimposed layers. He created each of these multi-exposed images entirely in camera, mostly underwater, without the use of artificial lighting and the aid of any digital or darkroom manipulation. As a result, His works are of a contemplative and enigmatic character.

Adi Da writes about His Quandra Loka Suite:

Quandra Loka is a visual meditation on a very simple circumstance: a woman in and near a pool of water. Narcissus, the archetype of ego, gazes at his own reflection in a pond, never able to contact the "object" of his self-enamored affection. But Quandra, the true beloved, is one with the water itself, whether in or out of the pool.

I shot the majority of the images in Quandra Loka underwater, or with the camera lens partially submerged in water, so that the water functions as a vast and subtly complex lens, achieving visual results not possible by any technical means. The images are made by a "technique" that requires continuous participation in the living instant of the photographic situation — sensitive to the constantly changing sunlight conditions, the ever-shifting minute movements of the subject, and even my own ability to stay submerged underwater. This "method" is beyond conceptual effort, beyond conventions of control in the ordinary sense, beyond point of view. This process of generating images — involving absolute awareness of every detail of what is occurring and (simultaneously) an intuitive trust in allowing the ultimately unpredictable process to take place — is a means of allowing reality to be self-manifested.

I intend these images to "picture" the unity of the undifferentiated reality from which all appearances emerge in a constant flow of changes. The entire span of human possibilities is reflected in these images — both "positive" and "negative." But all possibilities are seen in the context of that inherent unity or indivisible space. The positives and the negatives are all transcended, rather than any attempt being made to render them acceptable in and of themselves.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Donald Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics. About Adi Da's Quandra Loka he writes:

What is perhaps most striking about Adi Da's photographs is their gnostic quality — the intricate movement of light and shadow that gives them their expressive depth and profound intimacy. It is more than a matter of standard chiaroscuro. Adi Da is not simply employing the evocative power of light and shadow, but bringing out their emblematic character. Interweaving them — and in numerous works skeins of light (“the fire of the sun”) play over and within shadowy if transparent water (“the water of life”) — Adi Da suggests the union of opposites that is the core of mystical experience. Ecstatic experience of their unity brings with it a sense of the immeasurable. Adi Da places us in a garden of paradise — as the lush vegetation that appears in many photographs suggests — and the female body may be its ripest, most perfect fruit, but it is a paradise not just because of her presence but because we experience it as illimitable. It is space that is no longer divided against itself because its light and dark are inseparable. One extreme can no longer take the measure of the other extreme — afford a kind of detached perspective on it, as it were — because the extremes have been integrated. The physicist David Bohm describes mystical experience as an attempt “to reach the immeasurable, that is, a state of mind in which [one] ceases to sense a separation between [oneself] and the whole of reality.” It is a state of mind which has no measure — a state of mind beyond the everyday measurable state of mind. Adi Da conveys this transcendental state of mind by fusing elemental light, shadow, water, and body in a dimensionless space.

Donald Kuspit, The Female Nude in the Art of Adi Da Samraj

Related links:

Images from the Quandra Loka Suite were first exhibited at The Louis Stern Fine Arts Gallery in April, 2003.
The "Bright" Room Gallery in Maria Hoop, The Netherlands, houses a permanent collection of images from the Quandra Loka Suite.
Images from the Quandra Loka Suite were exhibited at The 2012 PAN Amsterdam Art Fair.
For more about the Quandra Loka Suite, read and view the catalog, The Quandra Loka Suite: 52 Views.
Also read Donald Kuspit's essay on Adi Da's Image-Art (particularly, His Quandra Loka Suite), The Female Nude in the Art of Adi Da Samraj.
Da Plastique also offers some of the images from the Quandra Loka Suite for purchase.

Galerie Pien Rademakers

Galerie Pien Rademakers initiates a follow-up to the highly successful solo exhibition of Adi Da Samraj’s black and white photographic images in 2013. These never previously exhibited colorful works by Adi Da Samraj, are from the series, Quandra Loka. "A tribute to the woman, as the source of our existence", is what Quandra Loka symbolizes, says cabaret artist and UNICEF ambassador Paul van Vliet.

Pien Rademakers

In the following video interview, Pien Rademakers talks about the experience of exhibiting works from Adi Da's Quandra Loka in 2012.

Pien Rademakers gives another interview (in Dutch) with Ratatouille TV in the following video from June, 2014:

Galerie Pien Rademakers

Pien Rademakers celebrating the exhibition
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Sunset over the Amsterdam canal where Galerie Pien Rademakers is located (May, 2014)
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

The KunstRAI Art Fair 2014

RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre

June 4 - 9, 2014 — The KunstRAI is a national art fair held at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre in Amsterdam, Netherlands, every May. The fair features modern and contemporary art from both Dutch artists and international artists. KunstRAI celebrates its 30th Anniversary this year!

The fair includes sixty high-class galleries — including Galerie Pien Rademakers (in Stand 35, open 11:00am - 6:00pm each day of the fair) — which collectively reflect the diversity, quality and pluralism of the historically rich offering that is Dutch art.

KunstRAI's Solostands ("Solo booths") enable galleries to feature one of their artists in particular, to enhance the appreciation and understanding of the work of that artist. For its 2014 exhibition, Galerie Pien Rademakers has chosen Adi Da Samraj for its Solostand.

The video below takes you on a tour of KunstRAI 2013. The commentary is in Dutch, but the art speaks for itself.

[About Adi Da's Art at KunstRAI:] The colored works jump out and nearly blind you with the intensity of the color.

Gould's 3D List
Art in Amsterdam

Click on images to view enlargements.

KunstRAI Art Fair 2014
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

KunstRAI Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

KunstRAI Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy Lost Painters Web Magazine)

KunstRAI Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

The Quandra Loka Exhibition

The work of Adi Da Samraj at Galerie Pien Rademakers is a great ode to the beauty of life and especially the female body, as the source of all life. Deceased in 2008, Adi Da was not only an artist but also a spiritual leader — and he is still that for many devotees. He wanted to show through his art the "invisible unity" in the world around us. He does so in truly stunning photographs, which he took partly under water (as can be seen in a video shown at the gallery). This produces wonderfully languid, sultry, almost psychedelic images that show patches of naked bodies, light that shines on water, palm trees and flowers, and soothing summer colors. And all without digital trickery — very attractive.

Arjan Reinders, May 30, 2014
Kunstbeeld Art Magazine

Click on images to view enlargements.

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy Rob Gaasbeek)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy Rob Gaasbeek)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy Ruy Carpenter)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy Ruy Carpenter)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy Arjan Reinders, Kunstbeeld Art Magazine)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy DaPlastique)

Galerie Pien Rademakers Exhibition of Quandra Loka
(photo courtesy Arjan Reinders, Kunstbeeld Art Magazine)

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Quotations from and/or photographs of Avatar Adi Da Samraj used by permission of the copyright owner:
© Copyrighted materials used with the permission of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. None of these materials may be disseminated or otherwise used for any non-personal purpose without the prior agreement of the copyright owner. ADIDAM is a trademark of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as Trustee for the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

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