October Opening: Front Galley

Arts Society of Kingston presents Gurmi Lama: Rivers Meeting.

This solo exhibition features a curated selection of past and recent works created using gouache, gold, acrylic, and oil. Bridging the traditional and the contemporary, the East and the West, and the spiritual and the material, Gurmi’s art creates a dialogue between past and present. He thoughtfully reinterprets traditional thangka painting influences and techniques to explore contemporary themes, honoring ancient heritage while speaking to the modern world.

Materials and media:
- Gouache
- Gold
- Acrylic
- Oil

Gurmi Lama was born in Solukhumbu, Nepal, and was raised by his grandmother. He began artistic training as a teenager, studying thangka painting with his father. After completing a BA at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Lama established himself as a thangka painter and later studied contemporary art with Nepalese painter and writer Manuj Babu Mishra, expanding his practice while remaining grounded in traditional training.

Lama has taught thangka painting to local and international students in his Kathmandu studio and served for nine years as a thangka painting instructor for Naropa University’s Abroad Program in Nepal. His work is held in institutional and private collections across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and Asia.

His portraits seek to capture likeness while deliberately moving away from strict realism, allowing memory, personality, and lived experience to emerge. Other works explore perceptions of an ever-changing world, drawing from humor, trauma, dreams, delusion, happiness, and the frustrations of everyday life.

Rather than adhering to a particular movement or ideology, Lama embraces an intuitive and deeply personal approach. Perception, in his practice, reflects an ongoing negotiation between opposing forces—tradition and contemporary life, humor and trauma, reality and imagination, beauty and uncertainty.

The exhibition offers a view into an artist whose practice is rooted in cultural inheritance and personal experience, using painting and sculpture to explore how we make sense of the world and how our perceptions continually shape it.