About

Ajna Soni Dalamal Sabnani was born in 1954 in Tangier, Morocco. Her artistic talent was rewarded as early as 1960 when her first oil painting was bought by Coca Cola in Tangier. Her eclectic background in the international city of Tangier was further enhanced in India, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and London where she learned traditional techniques, which are portrayed in images of past and present in hyperreal tendencies. Her art training continued in Byam Shaw School of Art and Camden Arts Centre in London and she continues her traditional multi cultural art studies to date. She has illustrated some books and was commissioned art work for the Commission of Racial Equality in London. Her paintings are in private and public collections in Sri Lanka, London, USA, and Europe. Some of her major exhibitions and awards are enlisted below:

The following is translated from a text by Javier de la Rosa (Poet, Art Critic, Senator of Academia de Arte Moderno di Roma, Association of International Art Critics, and Nobel Peace Prize nominate).

Ajna's Spirit & Art

Let us dance to the sacred music of all time in Ajna's message of reconciliation. Ajna manifests herself through the creation and interpretation of landscape and portrait of life, with the spirit of life awaiting its nectar, within the irony of the hyperreal. Painting is not only an expression through technique. It is, most of all, a sentiment, a feeling of the represented and expressed in oils: the feelings slip into contours into which the artist exhales the breath of spirit. It is the ideal repose for acquiring the enchantment of the magic in a landscape and reflect it in veils of light and shade. At the top of the pyramid of time, looking into mirrors that reflect the other self, Ajna keeps afloat on the ocean of destiny only to die at the feet of the swan which flies to the other skies, looking for waters which will allow her the portraiture of Leda who allows herself to be seduced by her own waters.

Ajna assumes the Aristotelian position Light and Shadow arise in species'. Looking East, towards the mysteries of India, a hyperreal tiger appears at the beckon of her hands, enchanted by her technique. Looking West, in England, the mist is penetrated by the gems of her unique work. Her felines leap on to 'the other side' into oleous matter permeated and penetrated by the magnificent animism in her message as the Swan and Leda are transported through turbulent horizons and emerge from her multiple zero brushes which bring to life a unique cosmos, where archetypes find their own symbolsin nature herself.

Ajna's Self

Ajna laughs and dissolves into a spring of vital waters. She is reborn on her own canvas as Leda and as Venus from the Botticelean spring. In Italy, the secrets transcend towards the Indian horizon, which spreads itself as an electric rainbow - sky with the earth.

Ajna's World

Utopia, a place that awakens and takes a step backwards, looking for its reflection in a mirror of myths, as life finds itself within them. Meandering on destiny's feet, life reminds us that reality awaits us at the corner of the nonexistent. The gods in Ajna, the artist, surrealized and submerged in their own fountain, destine themselves to the altars of the universe in an indisputable version. The universal God, at a time full of constraints, destroys the threads of his own canvas, only to be realized as perfect and vibrant, thus singularizing the artist in an acoustic symphony with Nature as her own mother.