October Show: Front Gallery

Arts Society of Kingston presents Gurmi Lama: Rivers Meeting

This solo exhibition features a curated selection of Gurmi’s 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. By thoughtfully reinterpreting traditional Thanka painting influences and techniques to explore contemporary themes, his work honors ancient heritage while speaking to the modern world.

His pieces are held in institutional and private collections across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and Asia.

Born in Solukhumbu, Nepal, Gurmi Lama was raised by his grandmother and began his artistic training as a teenager, studying thangka painting with his father. By the time he completed his BA at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Lama had established himself as a successful thangka painter. He later studied contemporary art with Nepalese painter and writer Manuj Babu Mishra, expanding his practice while remaining grounded in his 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.

For Lama, artistic style and medium are tools for communicating the deeper message of the artist. His portraits seek to capture the likeness of his subjects while deliberately moving away from strict realism, allowing memory, personality, and lived experience to emerge. His other works explore his 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 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 both 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.

Gurmi Lama: Perception will be on view in ASK’s FRONT Gallery from October 3 through October 31, 2026. The public is invited to the opening reception on Saturday, October 3, from 3:00–5:00 PM.