Exhibition: Robert Beer: Visions of the Divine, October Gallery, London, April 19 – May 26 2012

Experts on the Buddhist and Hindu art the October Gallery devotes a spring show to are rarely as oracular as Robert Beer.

The author and illustrator of The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs has spent a lifetime studying art from the sky-shadowed plateau. Since 1997, he’s worked with artists in the Kathmandu Valley, nurturing their skills to craft the most extensive collection of contemporary art from the region.

It’s a journey through the Life of the Buddha, universal cosmology, joy, woe and deities, running a gamut between high spirits and sheer wrath.

“Even though I have been involved in this seemingly obscure and academic research for the past 40 years, I have always tended to view it as a vehicle for my own self-realisation,” he reflects, having originally been inspired by a vivid spirit communication from his sister, shortly after her death when he was a Cardiff teenager.

“It is a by-product of the same spiritual process of introspection and analysis that began for me at the age of 14. It defines what I do, but not who I am.

“Throughout my life I have had many different mystical and spiritual experiences – some prolonged and blissful, other spontaneous and image-shattering. They are part of the imaginative and spiritual landscape that I have chosen to explore and inhabit.”

This display, which is of such detail that visitors will be given magnifying glasses to scrutinize the finer details, is both a follow-up to a previous exhibition of work – 2003’s Radiant Transmission – and exposure for a renaissance of the modern art movement in Kathmandu.

Photo-realism, chiaroscuro techniques and a sense of innovation saturate the oil, acrylic and water-based pigments, accompanied by Beer’s own brush-and-ink drawings of symbols, as well as a Synaesthesia section dedicated to the mandala paintings of John FB Miles, the mentor who Beer calls “the most powerful visionary artist of his generation.”

A series of copper statues, cast in “lost-wax” and then carved to unleash the deities within them, oversee the journey to a land whose art seems as complex and captivating as its spiritualism.

• Open 12.30pm-5.30pm Tuesday-Saturday. Admission free.