Sundaram Tagore Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings, photography and sculpture by gallery artists who share unique perspectives that awaken us to new ways of seeing the world.

Through the use of color, texture, line, shape and form, this global group of artists reimagines existing realties, challenges social constructs and slows down time to create moments of quiet contemplation.

New York-based artist Miya Ando (b. 1973, Los Angeles) is widely known for her expansive series of cloud paintings, which are rooted in the Japanese concept mono no aware. The phrase, which loosely translates as “an acute awareness of the transience of things”, is a sentiment often linked to nature and the passage of time. “The paintings invite viewers to consider an alternative perspective—to become aware of and to appreciate the present moment”, says Ando.

Ando’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Corning Museum of Glass, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; as well as numerous private collections.

American/British artist Karen Knorr (b. 1954, Germany) creates sumptuous photographs that employ opulent architectural settings in Western Europe and Asia to frame issues of power rooted in cultural heritage. Knorr digitally imposes images of tigers, elephants, peacocks and monkeys, which she photographs in reserves and zoos, within these lavish spaces. The settings are symbolic of wealth and social hierarchies and the animals who wander through them disrupt and disturb the power dynamics.

Knorr’s work is in the collections of Tate London, Victoria & Albert Museum and United Kingdom Government Art Collection, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, among others.

Through her work, Jane Lee (b. 1963, Singapore) seeks to expand our perception of form and meaning in painting. She is less interested in depicting external phenomena, but instead, reveals the internal world of paintings, examining the very nature of paint itself, its latent properties and potentials as both material and object. Lee’s lush, sculptural paintings are both deconstructed and reconstructed entities, embodying both form and emptiness.

One of Southeast Asia’s most respected artists, Lee rose to international acclaim when she exhibited her monumental installation Raw canvas—composed of thousands of strands of paint layered into a thick tapestry—at the 2008 Singapore Biennale curated by Fumio Nanjo. Last year, her work was the subject of a major solo exhibition including large, immersive works at the Singapore Art Museum.

Beijing-based sculptor Zheng Lu (b. 1978, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia) skillfully merges concepts rooted in Chinese philosophy and elements of the natural world with material explorations that push the boundaries of physical form. Zheng is best known for his Water in Dripping series of dynamic stainless-steel compositions evoking splashes of water suspended midair. “Water is a very important motif in my art”, he says. “As a key element in Chinese philosophy, it was observed, visualized and ruminated upon rather than examined in terms of logic”.

Zheng’s large-scale installations have been exhibited in museums and public spaces around the world, including, most recently, a gleaming twenty-foot-tall steel sculpture installed adjacent to the United Nations complex in midtown Manhattan.

Celebrated as an unsurpassed colorist and for the beauty of his large-scale abstract works, Robert Natkin (1930–2010) was a Chicago-born artist associated with the Color Field and Lyrical Abstraction painters. His hues are shamelessly seductive, whether deployed in vertical columns in his Apollo paintings, spread in gauzy veils in his Bath series, or strikingly textured in the Bern pictures. On his canvases, paint creates a seemingly infinite space in which iconographic details appear to hover or float through illusory depths.

Natkin’s work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.

The atmospheric photographs of interiors altered by the passage by Robert Polidori (b. 1951, Montreal) are investigations into the psychological implications of the human habitat. Polidori’s career as a fine-art photographer began in the early 1980s when he gained permission to document the restoration of the Palace of Versailles. Since then, he has returned to the palace several times to take more photographs, and in each one, his conception of rooms as metaphors and vessels of memory is evident.

Robert Polidori won the World Press Award in 1998 and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000. He is represented in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Throughout her long career, Susan Weil (b. 1930, New York) has consistently brought to life intangible qualities of time, creating multidimensional works in which she fractures the picture plane, deconstructing and reconstructing images. Her nebulous human forms are one of the themes she has returned to again and again and still explores today, namely, time expressed abstractly and in relation to nature and the figure in movement.

Weil is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is included in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden; and The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.

Robert Yasuda (b. 1940, Hawaii) is known for luminous multi-panel works composed of translucent, veil-like fields of color layered on slabs of wood that protrude from the wall or nestle into corners. Depending on where you stand, the surfaces of the paintings shift in color and temperature. Yasuda invites viewers to pause and immerse themselves in the work in order to perceive these subtle transformations revealed over time.

Yasuda has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His works are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The New York Public Library; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; and The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.