Transcendental Realism: The Image-Art of Egoless Coincidence with Reality Itself (New, Expanded Second Edition)

True art heals. True art restores equanimity. Art must regenerate the sense of well-being. That is its true purpose. --Adi Da Samraj 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 60's to 90's 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. This greatly expanded second edition contains ten new essays which Adi Da wrote in the final year of his life, together with all of the essays published in the first edition of Transcendental Realism, as well as those published in Aesthetic Ecstasy and Perfect Abstraction. Also new is a series of black-and-white photographs of Adi Da working in his studio, and a greatly expanded color insert with 24 pages of high-quality stunning replications of his image-art. "I believe that art should always be a surprise. It must create, even in the critic, not emotion, but a sense of insecurity. When one views Adi Da's art, it is easy to see 'pop art', 'op art', all the possible linguistic, ethnological, and iconographic references but, in the end, the final work is always a surprise. With Adi Da's work, I did not simply find myself in front of a new personal iconographic universe but rather in front of images that returned me to an experience of 'epiphany'." --Achille Bonito Oliva, Italian art critic, historian, and past Director of the Venice Biennale. "[Adi Da's] pursuit of the spiritual paths found in early abstraction, from Kandinsky to Mondrian, and [his] translation of that pursuit into the digital age, restore a transcendental spirituality to the materialism of the machine aesthetic." -- Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe