The Hudson Collection Gallery - Celebrating The Hudson Collection Shiva Linga Paintings

Ten years ago David T. Hanson began working with Hudson, Founder and Director of the New York art gallery Feature Inc., to organize an exhibition for ICON of a suite of 71 anonymous Shiva Linga paintings that had been assembled by Hudson and the French poet Franck André Jamme. Sadly, due to the unexpected death of Hudson, this exhibition had to be cancelled. But two years later Hudson’s siblings granted Hanson permission to purchase twelve of the paintings. He subsequently organized an exhibition at ICON of those twelve paintings along with a few of his color photographs of Indian temples. Patricia Hudson was so impressed with this small show and the Fairfield community’s interest in it that she and her two brothers decided to very generously donate the remainder of the suite of paintings to ICON’s permanent collection. In response, ICON created a dedicated space, the Hudson Gallery, to exhibit selections of the Hudson Collection along with other related artworks.

Shiva Linga paintings on found paper are created anonymously in northwestern India by practitioners of Tantrism, some of whom are artists, to represent and embody fundamental aspects of Tantra, a vast and complex spiritual and philosophical practice. Made to awaken heightened consciousness, these devotional images are used for visualization and meditation as part of Tantra’s spiritual practices. Despite their expression of an unbroken, centuries-old tradition, the works in this exhibition (made between 1966 and 2004) seem both timeless and utterly contemporary. They also possess a remarkable affinity with examples of twentieth-century abstract art.

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