Jamali: Mystical Expressionism/Paintings - Tapa dura

Jamali grew up in the ancient crossroads city of Peshawar, near the Khyber Pass in the northwestern Himalayas. At age 13, he was sent to a British military academy from which he was expelled at age 16. He went to live in primitive and austere conditions in the Rajasthan desert for five years, and from there he went to Kafiristan, a tiny valley high in the Himalayas. In 1973, he travelled extensively in Europe, then emigrated to the United States and became a U.S. citizen. Since then he has lived in Winter Park, Florida. Jamali has created a large body of work in several innovative techniques. His works are in 1500 private collections in the United States. He brings together mysticism and quantum mechanics in a beautiful and powerful chthonic art. This convergence is the subject of Donald Kuspit's essay. Kuspit says, "Jamali's saturated, esoteric paintings-- many are literally weighty as well as iconographically exotic-- have their necessary place in our secular world: they are among the important mystical efforts to save humankind from itself by restoring its sense of the divine possibilities of being-- the possibility of being divine while being all too human."

Donald Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics. Winner of the prestigious Frank Jewet Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (1983), given by the College Art Association, Professor Kuspit is a Contributing Editor at Artforum, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner magazines, Editor of Art Criticism, and is on the advisory board of Centennial Review. He is also the editor of a series on American Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press. He holds doctorates in philosophy (University of Frankfurt) and art history (University of Michigan), as well as degrees from Columbia University, Yale University, and Pennsylvania State University, and has completed the course of study at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical Center. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations. Some of his most recent books are The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, The Dialectic of Decadence, The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art, and Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde, and books on Leon Golub and Louise Bourgeois. He is Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Mark Strand teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of nine books of poems, the most recent of which is Dark Harbor. A MacArthur Fellow and U.S. Poet Laureate 1990-91, he was awarded the Bollinger Prize for poetry in 1993. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and son.