@raviamarzupa

Ravi Zupa has spent decades studying books about the art, mythology, religion, and history of cultures from across geography and time. Entirely self-taught, Zupa looks to works by German Renaissance printmakers, Flemish primitives, abstract expressionists, Japanese woodblock artists, and Mughal painters for inspiration. He also frequently incorporates religious iconography from Europe, Asia, and Pre-Columbian Latin America with revolutionary propaganda from around the world. With a distaste for ironic art or the thoughtless appropriation of culture, he integrates seemingly unrelated images in search of something universal. Zupa does not create any of his art digitally; everything comes from his own hand. The content of these works reflects a lifetime spent studying and interpreting artistic movements and visual vocabularies from around the world as well as reverse-engineering their methods to recreate and combine them. It also draws from a childhood shaped by a similar blending of cultures and enriched by exposure to diverse forms of art and thought.

“My father grew up in New York City during the 1940s and ’50s, a poor, Catholic, Italian-American. My mother was raised Methodist. In the 1950s and ’60s, my father became involved in New York’s jazz and art scenes, and through that world, he was introduced to Islam—first through the Nation of Islam and later in the early 1960s, he became a Sunni Muslim. After moving to New York City in the 1960s, my mother converted to an Indian spiritual tradition called Surat Shabd Yoga. This was part of a broader wave of Indian spiritual leaders coming westward at the time, seeking white American converts. Like many of those traditions, Surat Shabd Yoga has roots in Sikhism. She has remained deeply committed to this path and continues to live in an ashram to this day. My father died while my mother was pregnant with me. Both of my parents were artists, as were my four siblings—each of us developing our own unique artistic interests. In our household, art was an ordinary part of daily life—no different from eating breakfast. We had access to a wide range of materials and tools, and were given remarkable (and perhaps unsafe) freedom to explore whatever sparked our curiosity. Surrounded by drawing and painting supplies, paper and canvas, wood, metal, power tools, kilns, clay, wax-casting material, and endless art books, we were constantly creating, experimenting, and tinkering. From an early age, we attended Satsang (a gathering similar to church), and my mother read to us from a wide range of sources: Greek mythology, the Bible, Beowulf, the Mahabharata, the Popol Vuh, and folk tales from cultures all around the world. These stories helped me recognize the striking similarities between mythological motifs from vastly different traditions. Characters like Medusa, La Llorona, Baba Yaga, and Kali shared striking parallels and evoked similar responses in us children, despite coming from entirely separate cultural contexts. This early exposure to the universality of myth has remained the primary driver of my artistic curiosity.”