This image is the cover for the book Transcendental Realism

Transcendental Realism

Adi Da Samraj created art for over forty years with a single intention: the visual communication of truth, and the means to draw the viewer beyond separateness into the paradox of "indivisible unity". Adi Da began his first serious photographic work in the early 1960s. From the mid-'60s to the '90s he produced a diverse body of drawings, paintings, and sculptural forms. 1998 marked the beginning of an intensive six-year period of photographic and videographic work. In 2006 Adi Da moved to digital technology, while still combining hand-drawn and painted forms as well as photographs within his compositions. Full-scale fabrications of Adi Da Samraj's images have included many forms of media, from monumentally-scaled paints on aluminum, to large-scale pigmented inks on canvas, photographic and videographic works, sculptural light boxes, plasma screen installations, and projected performance events. The work of Adi Da Samraj has been exhibited in Europe and the United States. He was featured as an official solo collateral artist at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Adi Da was also the first contemporary artist to be given a solo exhibition by the city of Florence, exhibited in the Cenacolo di Ognissanti. Transcendental Realism brings together all of Adi Da's writings on art. It includes details on the methods, meaning, and purposes of his own work, his penetrating insight into the present-day culture and purpose of art, and specific recommendations on how to participate ecstatically in art. Adi Da also intensively considers the error of presuming oneself to be separate from a work of art and he invites every individual to be drawn beyond this illusion of separateness into the ecstatic, living process of participating in his image-art. Includes color insert with 24 pages of high-quality stunning replications of his image-art.

Adi Da Samraj

Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008) described his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities: (1) investigating what is required for human beings to realize the true nature of reality, and (2) achieving the ability to communicate the true nature of reality through artistic means, both visual and literary. Adi Da Samraj graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature. His master's thesis, a study of core issues in modernism, focused on the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein and on the modernist painters of the same period. This study of modernist literature and painting was an early sign of Adi Da's interest in the modernist effort to break beyond the bounds of the perspectival point of view and to investigate the realities of perception and conscious awareness. His own artistic and literary works were intended to complete the modernist impulse, by going beyond point of view altogether and thereby conveying the core realities of conscious existence. In 1972, Adi Da Samraj began to teach, creating a vast repository of wisdom, in living dialogue with those who approached him. To date, his literary, philosophical, and practical writings consist of over seventy-five published books. Many of his talks are also available on CD and DVD.

The Dawn Horse Press