TSHERIN SHERPA

Tsherin Sherpa was born and raised in Kathmandu and from the age of thirteen studied Tibetan Buddhist scroll paintingwith his father. In his late twenties, he relocated to California, where he continued his traditional art practice beforemoving beyond its boundaries to establish his own, unique artistic expression.

Through distortion, deconstruction, rupture, and rearrangement, Sherpa stretches, bends, reconfigures, and repurposeselements from Tibetan art, merging them with modern imagery. Through these transformations, he contemplates thecollisions of culture and identity negotiated by displaced people. Sherpa’s creations celebrate Himalayan culture whilesimultaneously challenging its frequently romanticized representations.

Sherpa’s art resists simple classification, delicately balancing binaries such as sacred and secular, traditional and modern,gravity and humor. His creations challenge the formal strictures of his artistic training while also signaling his insistencethat meaning within his work should not, and cannot, be fixed. Like the forms themselves, meaning is open, fluid, andevolving, dependent on what each viewer projects onto them.

This exhibition’s paintings represent the latest evolution in Sherpa’s Protectors series. With them, the artist conveys theboundless energy of Tibetan Buddhism’s wrathful deities by transforming their usually static portrayals into great massesof swirling color reminiscent of hurricanes viewed from space. Except in one work, where they completely envelope thecanvas, these vibrant vortexes emerge from gleaming golden backgrounds, some figured with symbols from TibetanBuddhism’s often macabre iconography. But are these multihued maelstroms, their edges melting away in long drips,materializing from or instead dissolving into those luminous voids? With some of his playful titles, the artist appears tonod toward one of Buddhism’s most profound philosophical principles: nonduality, the reality that form and formlessnessare not so much opposites as both equally computations of the mind.

Sherpa’s exploration of ambiguity—and with it his resolve to situate meaning in the beholder’s eye—extends beyondBuddhist philosophy, to Western psychology and consumerism. An updated Protectors composition first presented atBrisbane’s 2015 Asia Pacific Triennial bears the cheeky title “This is not a Rorschach Test.” And the title of theexhibition’s sole sculptural work—a three-dimensional outgrowth from his Gestures series—references the futility ofmaterialism. An adaptation of a monumental bronze shown at the most recent Venice Biennale, the sculpture’s graspinglimbs, intertwined with serpents, are as much a phantasm as the objects of their attraction.__

Press release courtesy Almine Rech. Text: John Henry Rice.