Transfigurations

By Alex Grey. With contributions by Stephen Larsen, Donald Kuspit and Ken Wilber. Foreword by Albert Hofmann

Alex Grey's art leads us on a transformative journey through the opacity and darkness of the material world to the recovery of our divinely illuminated core. Images of becoming, of existential pain, search and confusion, love, death, and transcendence are icons in the long corridors of Grey's creative odyssey. From his earliest self-portraits and paintings of skeletons, to his most recent universal beings gridded with fire and eyes, Grey brings us an ever-deepening visual contemplation of the nature of personal and transpersonal identity.

Transfigurations is a continuation of the dialogue between body and soul begun in Grey’s first book Sacred Mirrors (1990). Transfigurations includes all of Grey’s major works completed in the past decade, presented here in 202 colour reproductions and 93 black-and-white images.

An essay by renowned author and transpersonal psychologist Stephen Larsen provides a biographical sketch of the artist’s creative process, struggling with his demons and glimpsing the light of the beyond within. Grey’s early forays into dark, transgressive performance art and his later theophanic installations are all documented in a special twenty-paged performance section.

Art critic Donald Kuspit elucidates Grey’s primary subject, mystical light, as it manifests through his unique approach to the human figure. A conversation between noted philosopher Ken Wilber and the artist explores the exciting possibilities of art serving as a vehicle for transformation.

Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, writes the foreword that places Grey’s work at the conjunction of science and mysticism.

Hardback edition.