artist profile
Tenzing Rigdol
born
1982
lives and works
New York, USA
education
BFA, University of Colorado at Denver, Denver, USA, 2005
Tibetan Traditional Sand Painting and Butter Sculpture, Shekar Choten Monastery, Kathmandu, Nepal, 2002
Diploma in Tibetan Traditional Thangkha Painting, Tibet Thangkha Art School, Kathmandu, Nepal, 1999
Tibetan Traditional Collage Thangkha Art, under the tutelage of Gen Tsering Yanki La, Tibet, 1998
Tibetan Carpet Design, Tibetan Handicraft Center, Dharamsala, India, 1997
about the artist
Trained in the traditional art forms of Tibetan thangkha painting, sand painting, and butter sculpture, Tenzing Rigdol is perfectly equipped to deliver a historicized, fantasized, and exoticized Tibet into the contemporary. He finds a simultaneously philosophical and graphic expression in a range of media that includes painting, sculpture, video installation, photography, performance, and even poetry. An impulse to collage together elements, sourced from spiritual, materialistic, political, or artistic dimensions, courses through his creativity as he continues to make work in response to the reality in which he lives as a young artist living in New York City. Rigdol has been the recipient of the Rubin Museum of Art’s Himalayan Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, USA, and the resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA. His work has also been featured in many international group exhibitions, mounted at the Colorado University Art Museum in Boulder, USA; the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, USA; UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History in Los Angeles, USA; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, USA; Rossi & Rossi in London, UK; the Songzhuang Art Center in Beijing, China; the City Gallery Wellington in New Zealand; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel.