Achille Bonito Oliva delivering a
commentary
on Adi Da's Art at the 52nd Venice Biennale
New
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.
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.
Cover
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 —
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.
Modernist
(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.
The
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
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
"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
The
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."
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
(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."
[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.
