Painter, sculptor and curator, Syed Saleem Arif Quadri was born in India in 1949 and moved to England with his family in 1966. He studied sculpture at Birmingham College of Art in 1969, later pursuing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1975. He has worked in many disciplines, including painting, printmaking, photography, ceramics, sculpture, artists books and drawings, and is fascinated with the exploration of space and interplanetary dimensions. In 2008, he was awarded an MBE for services to the Arts.
Painter, sculptor and curator, Syed Saleem Arif Quadri was born in Hyderabad, India in 1949, two years after the country gained its independence; his father was a surgeon and his mother an amateur painter. He later underlined the influence both his parents had on his work, his mother encouraging him to express himself in visual language and his father giving him his sense of curiosity about the world. In May 1966, the family decided to immigrate to England, settling in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. He attended Manor Park Grammar School before undertaking a BA in Sculpture at Birmingham College of Art from 1969 to 1972. Subsequently, he pursued postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art, London, studying painting from 1972 to 1975. While in London, he became fascinated by Dante's Inferno and the links, which he discovered between Dante's Christian fable and the traditional tales of Islam. After graduating, he decided to return to India, and travelled extensively in North America, Europe and the Asian sub-continent. A year later, in 1976, he came back to England, setting up his studio in London.
In the early 1970s, Quadri worked mainly with sculpture, producing Space Latticein 1971, which earned him the Young Sculptor of the Year Award. However, in the second half of the 1970s, he turned to the medium of paper and by 1981 had completed more than 500 small-scale works, some of which were acquired by the Government Art Collection in 1977. From 1982, the size and format of his paintings grew considerably, challenging traditional formats with voids and exploring the third dimension. He introduced muslin on paper with works such as Garden of Expectation (1985-86) and Enchantment of Sky, Sea and Earth (1986). Since 1990, Quadri's paintings have been constructed on a versatile wood support, standing half and inch away from the wall. This device underlines and enhances his concepts of 'volumetric space' and of 'pregnant space', as the paintings seem to float away from the wall surface, adding a third dimension to his pictorial language. The two concepts of 'volumetric space' and 'pregnant space' are fundamental to the work, speaking to the artist's fascination with space and interplanetary dimensions.
Quadri has exhibited widely throughout his career in both group and solo shows. In 1970 he featured as a rising star in Young Contemporaries at London's Royal Academy. A decade later his work was presented in consecutive years at the Hayward Annual in London and Edinburgh and he participated in the Whitechapel Open at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1987 & 1989. From 1982-85 his Images from Dante's Inferno exhibition toured throughout the UK and India and, in 1989, he featured in Rasheed Araeen's groundbreaking exhibition, The Other Story , held at London's Hayward Gallery. Quadri has also curated the exhibition Kanu Gandhi’s Mahatma at Leicester Museum in 1991, and has assisted with several other exhibition projects, notably for the New Art Exchange, Nottingham since 2009. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, his work featured in Ben Uri's online exhibition Midnight's Family: 75 Years of Indian Artists in Britain. Since 1999, Quadri has moved away from painting, and has evolved a particular fascination for creating artist's books, such as 'Sensual Songs, his first series of unique works on paper. In June 2008, he was awarded an MBE for services to the Arts. His work is widely represented in UK public collections, including Tate and the Government Art Collection.