A tribute to artist-sculptor-writer Shakti Maira

Shakti Maira, who passed away in Delhi, lived a full life of an artist, writer, and thinker

Artist, philosopher, sculptor and writer Shakti Maira, 74, who died in Delhi left behind a multifaceted legacy. Maira saw himself as a realist, who explored and expressed the tangible. His observers saw a deep spiritual passion in his work, a Buddhism-inspired one. He will live on through his works that are at the National Gallery of Modern Art and private collections around the world. Through numerous exhibitions, talks, and writings, Maira took his work and ideas to audiences across the globe. “To integrate spirit and matter in an aesthetic presentation that opens the viewer to an integral moment is remarkable enough. But what is truly astonishing about Shakti’s work is the depth to which that intention is realised,” American philosopher Ken Wilber had said about him after their time together at Wilber’s Integral Institute in the late 1990s. When he was painting the Fallen Gods and Intimations of Transcendence series, Maira went beyond two-dimensionality and expressed himself via sculpture. His first sculptural series Sunyatta (1989) was made simply of papier mache and copper from discarded parts he had found in a junkyard near where he lived in New Hampshire at the time.