Aicon Gallery has announced that the Indian-American artist Anil Revri has died aged 67. Born in New Delhi in 1956, Revri died peacefully in Washington, D.C., where he lived and worked for almost thirty years.
As a young man, Revri painted abstract landscapes informed by his childhood memories of the Indian countryside. In 1976, Revri enrolled as a student of interior design at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, before taking a sabbatical year to prepare for his first solo exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery. While working as an abstract painter, he made intricate and figurative pen and ink drawings, including the Freud/Jung (1975-80) series, having developed an interest in psychoanalysis while recuperating from an accident.
When he moved to the United States in 1982, Revri was increasingly influenced by geometry and scriptural text. He took a second degree in graphic design at the Cocoran College of Art and Design in D.C. and began exhibiting across the US. A series of his paintings, Cultural Crossings (1998-2001), was shown at the UN Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders in 2000. The paintings set extracts of sacred text taken from various religious traditions into intricately patterned geometric borders. In 2017, Revri claimed that his move to the US, as well as his development of an allergy to turpentine, caused his shift in technique. He recalls in the interview that after the move his work became more introspective — he made his late paintings using Tantric visualisation techniques and mantra meditation.
His later work drew from a range of disciplines, mixing architectural motifs with a monastic palette and principles of sacred geometry. Windows and doorways stand in the centre of many of the works in his late series, Geometric Abstractions (2019-2020). ‘When you see an open window in the work, you have reached the goal,’ Revri said on the opening of his 2021 solo exhibition at Katzen Arts Center, Washington D.C.
