Sohan Qadri (born 2 November 1932, in Punjab, India – died 2 March 2011, in Toronto, Canada) was a yogi, poet and a painter from India who lived in Copenhagen for 30 years. During his life, Qadri interacted with a number of well-known cultural figures including Surrealist painter René Magritte, Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, and architect Le Corbusier. His paintings result from states of deep meditation, and are influenced by the colors of India: luminous, dye-infused works on serrated paper. He had more than 70 exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Early life and career in India
Sohan Qadri was born in the village of Chachoki, in 1932, in British India. Chachoki is near the industrial town of Phagwara in the Kapurthala district of Punjab. He grew up in a wealthy farming family with a Hindu mother and a Sikh father. The village had no electricity, running water, roads or cars.
At the age of seven, Qadri was strongly influenced by two spiritualists. The first was Bikham Giri, a Bengali Tantric-Vajrayan yogi. The second was Ahmed Ali Shah Qadri, a Sufi, who lived near Giri. Both gurus taught him spiritual ideals through meditation, dance and music, and had a profound impact on Qadri, sparking a lifelong interest in spirituality and art, for which Qadri showed talent even as a child. Qadri continued his schooling until the eighth grade, when he matriculated, the first child in the village to do so. He ran away from home several times to avoid taking charge of the family farm as his mother wished. Eventually he refused and went to study a three-year undergraduate degree at Ram Garhia College, pursuing his art as an apprentice to Pyara Singh, a photographer with a studio in Jullandhar, Punjab.
When Singh emigrated to England in 1952, Sohan left Jullandhar for Bombay, settling in Parel and working as a still photographer in an early Bollywood studio in Andheri, Bombay. He resigned after completing two films. In 1955, he enrolled in the Simla College of Art. While a student, Qadri visited the art galleries of Delhi, met the artists Sailoz Mookherjea and J. Swaminathan, who were in the process of starting the group Unknown, and joined the artistic circle around the Indian modernists M.F. Husain, Syed Haider Raza, J. Swaminathan, and Ram Kumar, who were building on earlier Indian modernist movements such as the Calcutta Group (1942) and the Progressive Artists Group of Bombay (1947), while rejecting the reliance on figuration which the earlier artists had believed defined them as authentically Indian.
After finishing his degree, Qadri returned home to Phagwara and joined the faculty of the Phagwara Teachers Training College for three years. In 1961, Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, the founder and editor of the art journal Marg, and associate of the Bloomsbury Group of London, saw Qadri's work at a faculty exhibition, and became his first patron. Anand visited Phagwara in 1963 with Pierre Jeanneret, an architect and cousin of the architect Le Corbusier, who acquired a painting for his collection. Anand and Jeanneret invited Qadri to bring his work to the newly built city of Chandigarh, capital of Punjab and Haryana, designed by Le Corbusier. Qadri's first exhibition was the second exhibition to be held at Gandhi Bhavan, the Punjab University Library art gallery designed by Jeanneret (the first was MF Husain's). During this time Sohan changed his last name from Singh to Qadri as a sign of devotion to his Sufi teacher.
Qadri gained some critical acclaim and began to paint more seriously, teaching himself about the School of Paris by reading the magazines Studio International, Illustrated Weekly of India, and Modern Review. He built himself a studio in Chachoki out of mud and straw bales to continue his art studies, and started creating figurative works, slowly veering toward abstraction, and ultimately abandoning representation in a search for transcendence. "When I start on a canvas," he said, "first I empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into a primordial space. Only emptiness, I feel, should communicate with the emptiness of the canvas." Instead of using subject matter drawn from the gritty urban world like many of his contemporaries, he searched for subject matter that inspired spiritual feelings and turned to an Eastern mode of expression full of bhava or mood. "I was focusing purely on color and form without distraction from figure," he said.