Tiffani Hollack Gyatso was born in 1981 and grew up in the countryside of São Paulo, Brazil in a community which her parents built. During her teens she lived in a sailing boat and later she lived a while with the aboriginals at the Australian desert. In 2000 she drove from Germany, through Russia untill Mongolia where she saw thangka painting (Tibetan sacred arts) for the first time and decided right there she would learn it. Though before that she went to Germany where she worked and studied graphik and web deisgn. In 2003 she finally moved to north India, Dharamsala and was accepted as the first foreigner at the Norbulingka Institute founded by H.H. the Dalai Lama and studied thangka painting untill 2006. She returned to Brazil together with her tibetan partner and they had their son at the end of the same year.

End of 2007 she was invited to coordinate the wall paintings of the buddhist temple Caminho do Meio CEBB in Rio Grande do Sul, south of Brazil a center guided by the brasilian physics and lama, Lama Padma Samten (www.caminhodomeio.org). The painting project was completed in 2012.

In 2012 she exhibited the series of contemporary work “Mystic Nostalgia” at the Tibet House NY, New York. See more: http://www.tiffanigyatso.com/#!__site_english/videos

The artist got her main knowledge in different painting techniques in not a very conventional way. Her teachers were ‘free souls’ that crossed her path and tought her all what they knew and what they were.

Besides painting mainly the sacred iconography from Tibet, she paints abstracts figures inspired by her own inner ‘gods and demons’.

“Thangka is a discpline that I need to practice when modern art had taken me too deep. The two oposites of art brings me balance. Thangka is the bread and modern art like water – though only bread makes it too dry and only water does not feed you – I need both. Discpline and freedom.”