Anil Revri holds a degree in interior design from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai and a BFA in graphic design from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC. Despite these contrasting backdrops, Revri's style is an intriguing marriage of these two disciplines and environments.
From the Washington Color School's abstract languages of serialized stripes, dots, and circles to the meditative aspects of Middle Eastern arts, Revri's works offer boundless theories about what truths can be expressed and discovered in the order of visual language. Noted art critic and historian Donald Kuspit states: "One of the things that makes Revri's abstractions unique — a major development in the history of abstraction — is that they articulate, with confident vision, the high order of abstraction — the exquisitely differentiated yet seamlessly unified structure — modern abstract art lacked from the start."
J. W. Mahoney, art critic for Art in America says that "Revri's art is completely new. New as in walking into Betty Parsons gallery and looking at a Jackson Pollack for the first time." How does Revri’s art work and why is it new? Mahoney explains: "In Revri’s work, your eye travels into a piece, encounters, beyond natural visual pleasure, a kind of arresting pressure toward an unseen but thoroughly present openness. The work serves as a gateway into a weirdly natural spaciousness: a singularity experience, of 'a point at which a function takes an infinite value.' Again, what we may be looking at is a geometric abstraction, but what we’re receiving is a fiercely voluntary journey into a primal experience of an invisible reality that clearly includes us, not as viewers but as participants."
Though abstract in their rendering, the works are inspired by Eastern philosophy. Each piece becomes a meditation and represents a single journey into the void. For Revri, this void holds the key to our deepest emotions — love, fear, and desire among them. The work merely serves as a platform to help the viewer make the transition between the conscious and unconscious states of mind.
The artist has thirty-eight solo exhibitions to his credit in India, Europe and the United States and is the first Indian American to be granted a solo show at a major American museum, namely the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His acclaimed Cultural Crossings series has earned the support of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and has been exhibited at the United Nations' Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders in 2000. A sculpture — Wall For Peace — he created for his show at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center was later exhibited at Dulles International Airport.
Anil Revri lives and works in Washington, DC.
Collection Highlights
Revri's work is featured in collections worldwide including Air India; American University Museum, Washington, DC; Asian Art Museum, Berlin; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; ITDC Hotels, India; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Ministry for Broadcasting, New Delhi; Ministry for Energy, New Delhi; Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Tata Sons ltd., Mumbai; US Department of State, Art in Embassies Program, US Consulate, Mumbai; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; John J. Wilson Building, City Hall Art Collection, Washington, DC and The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.
