October Gallery Opening: Gurmi Lama

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 powerful 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 directly
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 renowned Nepalese painter and writer
Manuj Babu Mishra, expanding his practice while remaining grounded in his traditional training.
Lama’s artistic journey bridges traditional and contemporary approaches to image-making. He
has taught thangka painting to both 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. His work has been collected internationally, with paintings held in private collections
throughout Europe, North and South America, Australia, and Asia.
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 artistic movement or ideology, Lama embraces an intuitive
and deeply personal approach to making art. Perception reflects this 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.