Art and Photography > What Others Say About Adi Da's Art

Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva delivering a commentary
on Adi Da's Art at the 52nd Venice Biennale

 
New Ways of Thinking About FilmNew Ways of Thinking About Film — Proposal by Freddy Paul Grunert and Cristina Fiordimela to regard films as a representation for how apparatus-based imaginings of Reality and Reality Itself correlate. Presented at The International Conference on Philosophy and Film, Karlsruhe, Germany, November, 2016.
 
Issue 25 of Babylon Magazine — In this issue, Cristina Fiordimela, visiting professor of Interior and Exhibition Design at the Architecture University of the Politecnico di Milano, writes the article, Transcendental Realism in the Works of Adi Da Samraj: A-Perspective, Geome, Linead, about how Adi Da has developed a grammar for re-describing the world as a system of relationships.
 
September 2015 Issue of La Toscana — In this issue, Daniela Pronesti, deputy director of Tuscany Culture, writes a review of the exhibition, The Ascent of Orpheus, entitled, "Adi Da Samraj: The great American artist who passed on in 2008 has an exhibition at the Bargello Museum with an exciting reinterpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice."
 
Not-Two Is Peace — Former Seattle Times dance critic Mary Murfin Bayley reviews the ballet performance event, Not-Two Is Peace, and its unique conjunction of dance and music with Adi Da's Image-Art and communication about world peace and Prior Unity.
 
Artweek.LA cover storyCover Story / Artist Profile — Artweek.LA's Cover Story and Artist Profile for the week of September 5, 2011, by journalist Craig Stephens, features the Image-Art of Adi Da Samraj.
 

"Orpheus and Linead": Sundaram Tagore Gallery "Orpheus and Linead": Sundaram Tagore Gallery — Installation Magazine's "Galleries Installed" (Aug. 21, 2011) reviews the invitational exhibition of Adi Da Samraj's work, curated by Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, on view at Sundaram Tagore Gallery Beverly Hills from Sep 8 - Oct 8, 2011.

   
 
Lisa Paul StreitfeldModernist (R)evolution in Chelsea: The Premiere of Adi Da Samraj — "Sundaram Tagore Gallery's New York premiere of the self-proclaimed avatar Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008) filled a vacuum existing in the art world expectantly awaiting the rise of the New since the tumult of the market fall. Curated by the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva, Orpheus and Linead celebrates a joyous union of opposites that polarized 20th century art into objective/nonobjective, abstract/figurative."

Lisa Paul Streitfeld
The Huffington Post
art critic, curator, performance artist and novelist

Also: Lisa's informal note about how she discovered Adi Da's art provides the interesting back story behind her subsequent formal review of His art.

 

Carol RaphaelThe Heart Was Released From Images: The Art of Adi Da Samraj (pdf, 2.4MB) — "Brancusi said that 'one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself by approaching the real sense of things.' What Adi Da is doing, though, is not really simple, either visually or metaphysically. His imagery is both highly complex, in terms of its composition and its execution, and startling pure or uncomplicated at the same time. Remarkably, he is attempting to transmit the totality of pure consciousness by means of the specificity of the manifest world — and he's succeeding."

Carol Raphael
What Is Enlightenment? Magazine
July - September, 2007

 
Donald Kuspit

The Female Nude in the Art of Adi Da Samraj — "It is a rare artist who can convey, convincingly, the sense of being face to face with the source of being. Adi Da can clearly live in the depths without succumbing to their pressure, bringing back pearls of art to prove it."

Donald Kuspit
professor of art history and philosophy
State University of New York at Stony Brook

 

Celia Rabinovitch"Tacit Glimpses": A Review of Adi Da Samraj’s "Transcendental Realism" and "Aesthetic Ecstasy" — "Adi Da extends and expands an alternative understanding of art that has run like an underground stream through history: appearing intermittently in the meditations of the scholar-artists of China’s T’ang dynasty; in the writings of Leonardo and Michelangelo in the Renaissance; and in the aesthetic theories of Kandinsky and Mondrian in the modern era."

Celia Rabinovitch
artist, writer, and Professor and Director of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba

 

Gary CoatesThe Rebirth of Sacred Art: Reflections on the Aperspectival Geometric Art of Adi Da Samraj — "For nearly forty years the artist, scholar and spiritual teacher Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008) was involved in the production of a highly diverse and unique body of artistic work, ranging from Zen-like ink brush paintings to multiple exposure photography, videographic suites synchronized with music and, most recently, monumentally scaled abstract geometric images generated by digital technology. Adi Da’s purpose in all of this work was to create images which would enable the fully participatory viewer to experience a taste of the inherently blissful state of nondual awareness that he asserts is our native condition once we transcend the presumption and experience of being a separate 'subjective' self perceiving a separate 'objective' reality."

Gary J. Coates
Professor and Victor L. Regnier Distinguished Faculty Chair
Department of Architecture
Kansas State University

 

The Ancient Walk-About Way of Adi Da Samraj — "Adi Da is the one and only artist whose art is beyond idiom. Adi Da is postmodern in this sense, because he knows the very locus from where things appear. Images are things, and they appear on the surface, carrying multiple messages of the locus. In this sense, Adi Da does not express, rather he creates. His images need to be appear ‘as it is’ — an expression of Reality Itself."

Rajesh Shukla
art critic, and author of Contemporizing Buddha, Hindu Tantra Yoga, and Concerning The Spiritual In Art: An Indian Modern Art Perspective


 
Achille Bonito Oliva

Commentary at the Inauguration of the Exhibition of Adi Da's Art at the 52nd Biennale di Venezie — "I believe that art should always be a surprise. It must create, even in the critic, not emotion, but a sense of insecurity. When one views Adi Da’s art, it is easy to see 'pop art', 'op art', all the possible linguistic, ethnological, and iconographic references — but, in the end, the final work is always a surprise. With Adi Da’s work, I did not simply find myself in front of a new personal iconographic universe but rather in front of images that returned me to an experience of 'epiphany'."

Achille Bonito Oliva
Italian art critic, historian,
and past Director of the Venice Biennale


Alberti's Window #9 in devotee's home

Alberti's Window #9 in devotee's home
(click to enlarge)


[Adi Da's] pursuit of the spiritual paths found in early abstraction, from Kandinsky to Mondrian, and [his] translation of that pursuit into the digital age, restore a transcendental spirituality to the materialism of the machine aesthetic.

Peter Weibel
Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruh


Adi Da's Art is a paradoxical experience, a multi-dimensional one, a revelatory one, a liberating one, an ordeal also, a participation that is extraordinary . . . In my opinion, this is utterly a Work of great genius, completely original and inspiring, a great gift to humanity, human culture, and the world of art.

Ron Fouts
Fine Art Publisher, Custom and Limited Editions


Adi Da's Work is a modern-day religious icon that communicates multiple levels of reality. Adi Da's exploration of mind, memory, the human psyche, is complex and multi-dimensional. This is the sacred art of our time.

David Hanson
Professor of Photography (retired),
Rhode Island School of Design


Adi Da is inviting us to see that art is capable of relating to the world in a way that reflects a truer understanding of reality than our present culture is willing to acknowledge.

It is also clear that the spiritual nature of His art lies not in any idealistic consideration of what ought to be, but in its insistence that we open our eyes and see what is; that that requires us to enter into a relationship, one in which we accept the fact of mystery, but gain a greater sense of meaning, and of affirmation.

Jan Taylor
Art historian, University of Ulster


I am most grateful to Adi Da Samraj for taking me through a healing process by perceptual, "unmediated watching" of His Divine Image-Art at a retreat at The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary, led by Mei-Ling Israel and Bob Carroll. Often it was as though I was seeing His Image-Art for the first time! As Adi Da Samraj says, "True art heals. True art restores equanimity. Art must regenerate the sense of well-being. That is its true purpose."

Ren-ai L., devotee



Discussions beneath Adi Da's Image-Art

(click to enlarge)



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