'I came to know about Piraji Sagara and his specialties of using wood and antique metal collages when I was in Mumbai in the late 1960s. So, my wife Flaminia and I took a trip to Ahmedabad to visit him and see his collection.

Piraji lived with his extended family on the outskirts of Ahmedabad city. We connected with Piraji right away. Flaminia and I were living in New York at the time and had a strong appreciation for the arts, spending time with friends who ran gallery shows on Madison Avenue, exhibits at the Met, and another friend who was the Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. Piraji recognized that we understood his work and that we could be the right people to spread his artwork in the USA.

We spent the whole day with Piraji, his brother and other family members, going through many of his artworks.

Piraji is something of a phenomenon. His career is a saga of a single-minded pursuit of rare originality. For his unique collages, he recycles antique materials, wood, nails, alloys and beads, to explore the intriguing nature of the Cosmos.

Untitled (Horse)

Piraji created this multi-media work to remind us that before the 15th century, the Western world believed that the Earth was the Center of the Universe. It was Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) who formulated a model of the Universe, Copernican heliocentrism, that placed the Sun at its center. This Piraji collage portrays the Greek legend of the sun - it centers on one of the four horses which were believed to drive the chariot of Helios, god of the Sun, daily from East to West.

I had this collage in my Italian shoe boutique in Newport Beach, California, and one day in 1989 I got a call that the Dalai Lama wanted to visit. He spent some time at the boutique and we received a blessing from his Holiness, as did our Piraji collage.'

- Bhagu Bhatia, January 2021