Pighalta Satya by Govinda Sah Azad

~ Born in 1974, Rajbiraj, Nepal, Govinda Sah Azad was interested in drawing and sculpture from an early age. He studied at the Fine Art College in Kathmandu  and had his first successful solo exhibition in 1999. In 2001 he began a nation-wide solo cycle tour to spread the awareness of peace through art and had several exhibitions in Mumbai, India, Dhaka, Bangladesh, before he graduated with a BA in Fine Art in 2003. Shortly after joining a MA Fine Art course in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he got the chance of private sponsorship and received an MA in Fine Art from Wimbledon College of Art in 2008. To date he has 24 group exhibitions in Nepal and internationally. ~

Pighalta Satya is an exhibition of paintings in which geometric shapes and forms, borrowed from ancient Tantric South Asian Mandalas, are used to investigate the conflict bewtween the infinite nature of human desire and the boundaries and limits we crteate to control them. The result is a cosmic explosion of colour and light.

Govinda Sah attempts to demonstrate the invisible through the visible. Within the drama of his clouds he explores invisible concepts such as morality, the environment, the sublime and the spiritual. The powerful universal imagery of clouds has been adopted by many religions as symbols of creation, fertility or heaven and has been used by a wide range of artists, from Turner to more contemporary artists such as Anish Kapoor.

His fascination with clouds and concepts of the mandala began with the landscape and temples of his home in Nepal, which led him to take on a three month solo cycle tour of the country. While painting the Annapurna Mountain range from Pokhara, he experienced a sublime sunrise. Clouds that began like small bubbles eventually filled the sky. The subject of his paintings from that moment changed.

His work also suggests an infinite universe; this invisible space portrayed by the visible cloud. This echoes a Hindu proverb; that God is in everything living and non-living, the earth or the sky. His presence is everywhere and nothing is in his absence. Author Anthony Blake has said of his work, "His very tangible, textured, exquisite and astonishing canvases are windows into primordial worlds and the mystery of how nothing becomes something."

Exhibition Opening

 

Workshop

 

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