Sohan Qadri
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.
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 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 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.
Qadri developed a methodology of painting during this period that he would use for the rest of his life, dividing pure colors into three categories or parts: dark, warm or cool, and light.
At the time, Indian artists mostly found patrons among the diplomatic or expatriate community, and among the collectors of Qadri's early art were the Belgian Consul and the Canadian and French ambassadors to India.
Using a fictitious invitation to a wedding in Nairobi, Qadri obtained a passport, and travelled to Mombasa, Kenya, in the luggage hold of a passenger ship.
At Tilgenkamp, Qadri prepared for his first European exhibition, held in November 1966 at the Gallerie Romain Louis in Brussels and arranged with the help of Swiss art critic Mark Kuhn.
Before driving with Kuhn from Brussels to Paris to meet Mulk Raj Anand and the Indian painter Syed Haider Raza, Qadri sold five paintings to a couple from Montreal who were on their way back to Canada to open a gallery.
Once in Paris, he secured an exhibition in December 1966 at the Gallerie Arnaud alongside European artists including Pierre Soulages, George Michaux, Jean Paul Riepal and Louis Fatoux.
When he returned to Zurich, Qadri received an invitation to an international artists' camp in Kushalin, Poland, where he was given lodging, food and painting materials for two months.
He also showed in Munich at Stenzel Gallerie and stayed for a period in 1968 in Paris where he rented American artist Mimi Vaz's studio in Villa d’Essai.
There he mixed with Pierre Soulages and James Michaux, whom he had met at the Arnaud Gallerie, along with the Indian artists Syed Haider Raza, Anjolie Ela Menon, N. Vishwanadhan, and Nikita Narayan.
During this time, Qadri stopped painting with impasto oil on canvas and experimented with paper, which he considered softer, more feminine, and more suited to works that evolved out of a meditative state.
In 1973, a few years after settling in Copenhagen, Qadri met another important patron, Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, to whom he was introduced during a show at the Bodo Galuab Gallery in Cologne, Germany.
During this period Qadri, along with American psychedelic painter Linda Wood and Pere Bacho, took over an old gun factory and helped found the free city of Christiania, where everything belonged to everyone.
He also began to plan a spiritual earth art project, a gyan stambha or knowledge stupa, on an ancient trading route in the Punjab in India.
