What is genius? A complicated, loaded term that is rarely heard these days in the self-conscious art world, the word genius is usually reserved for the old masters with centuries of authentic approval from art historians to back the bestowal of this now rarely used adjective.

However, genius was on show these two past weeks with Embodied Enlightenment, an exhibition at the Nepal Art Council in Babar Mahal (it wrapped up on June 9), highlighting the work of painter Samundra Man Singh Shrestha with a painstakingly assembled retrospective that highlights a career’s worth of groundbreaking work.

Conceived on the heels of 2011’s Jewels of Newar Art at the Siddhartha Art Gallery, curated by Sangeeta Thapa and organised by art collectors Purna and Anjana Shakya, Samundra’s solo show became a mission of great importance once the Shakyas were told, to their dismay, by the artist himself, that most of his now iconic works were residing outside of Nepal, bought by Asian collectors who had the cash and taste for collecting that is yet to hit the mainstream in Nepal.

As a result of Shakya’s efforts, five years later, 60 of Samundra’s works were made available for 13 days to the public eye, bringing in an astonishing 5,300 plus visitors in an unprecedentedly popular gallery show that captured the imagination of Kathmandu residents who swarmed around these powerful paintings in awe, looking slightly dazed by the sheer beauty on view.

So what is it about Samundra’s art that excites so much excitement and admiration? Summarising the words of Dr Dina Bangdel, the daughter of the famed artist and art historian Lain Singh Bangdel and a renowned scholar of the Himalayan arts herself, who curated the show, Samundra’s work is a combination of the tradition of devotional Newar paubha painting infused with Samundra’s own brand of virtuosity which brings the paintings firmly into the now; making them highly original works of creative genius that have a glowing, pop art-like aesthetic that makes them particularly appealing to the Nepali and Asian palette.

The now famous oil painting of Vajrapani started the commotion over Samundra’s work when it was exhibited at the Jewel’s of Newar Art show. Priced at the time at an astonishing 15 lakh rupees, Samundra’s reputation as something of a phenom was cemented by the then astronomical price placed upon what is now regarded as one of his most powerful, innovative, and riveting works.

Born in 1980, Samundra is only 36 years old and yet his oeuvre to date is large. The 60 odd works on display in this past show, augmented with contributions from some private collections, only represent about 50 percent of his work, a commentary on Nepal’s inability to keep its higher valued contemporary, or otherwise, artworks within its borders.  The artist’s most significant works, by his personal count, are abroad, sold by middlemen and dealers to clients willing to pay the sums demanded for these now extremely valuable paintings.

Samundra started painting young and was already prodigious, even when he was a young, untrained artist in school. Born to a middle class Hindu, Newar family, Dina Bangdel writes that while Samundra did not have the centuries old artistic traditions of the Chitrakars to back his creative leanings, he did have the benefit of having grown up in Raktakali at the heart of Kathmandu’s unique rituals where Hindu and Buddhist traditions intersect. Surrounded by such abundance of stimuli, the budding painter imbibed the richness of these artistic practices first hand. Samundra was also fortunate to have been adopted into the tradition of Newar paubha painting very early on, at the age of 14, trained by Prem Man Chitrakar, a master paubha painter himself.

The Newar tradition of paubha painting is rigorous, it requires knowledge of the all the many, various deities, the iconography associated with each of them, learning the iconometrics, which are the classical proportions for depicting these figures, and of course, a natural ease with fine draughtsmanship as an essential base.

Having mastered these techniques, the young, curious, precocious even, Samundra embarked on an exploratory path, moving away from the prescribed (they are not always used due to cost and lack of availability) mineral based paints used for traditional paubha painting to experiment with oils. He found that the medium of oil painting allowed him to better achieve his now signature style of hyper-realism which is augmented by an exceptional ability to create dynamic movement—as if his subjects, the gods and goddesses of Hinduism and Buddhism, are vibrating with life, animated by the painter’s brush, and in some cases seeming almost about to leap from the frames. I believe that these extraordinary painterly effects directly co-relate to the number of people who throng to see his work.

Personally speaking, I have never been to a show where I have seen so many excited people, young and old, devout or not, rapt in admiration at not just the fierce Vajrapani but also the dreamy Shiva Shakti; the delicate, poetic Padmapani Lokeshvara; his gorgeous, epic Vishnu as Dhanvantari, detailed uniquely with sophisticated symbolism relating to and subtly evoking the mythical connotations of the subject, and one of personal favourites, the sublime Amoghasiddhi—a work that shows the master hand of the artist by juxtaposing the living three dimensional Amoghasiddhi, the Buddha of the North, in his green, enlightened form, standing against an exquisitely rendered two dimensional backdrop painting of the very same; the deity seems embodied, brought to life by the hand of the painter.

This exhibition is an event made possible by the vision and commitment of the collectors, the Shakyas, who have worked long and hard to meet with collectors abroad, establish relationships, buy back key pieces, simultaneously learning all the while about the paintings themselves, and employing the skills of people like Dr Bangdel to curate and write the text for the beautiful book, titled Embodied Enlightenment after the exhibition, that is a by-product of this landmark show.

Think what you may of Samundra Man Singh’s work, he has been critiqued for being too ‘pop’, for aping Western masters from the Renaissance (think Michelangelo or Raphael who, too, bring legendary, mythical, and divine figures to life in their now priceless paintings), and for breaking from tradition, an accusation that Dina Bangdel defends eloquently in her introductory essay for the exhibition in the aforementioned book, but this artist’s ability to embody his works with the essence, if you will, of the power, beauty, and purity that we imagine our gods can emanate, is a feat that only a true master can execute.

I leave you with an anecdote: both times that I went to the exhibition I came across some remarkable behaviour. The first time I was told by a woman that I know that she had come to see Samundra’s show because she was his ‘fan’. I found myself smiling and nodding, even while (internally) noting that I had never, till then, heard of people being fans of painters.

The second time, walking around the show with Samundra himself, a young woman walked up to us, asking for a picture with the painter. Samundra, always humble and compassionate, went along. The woman eagerly took pictures with him, I gently suggested that maybe they should move in front of one of the paintings and have it in the background (for posterity, I thought to myself). After the photo she kept him talking for a few minutes then left reluctantly.

I think it is safe to say, from these two incidents, and the amount of people that have attended the show, that the cult of the artist has begun; never has it been more deserving.