Born in 1932 into a wealthy farming family in Chachoki, a small village in Punjab, India. At the age of seven, Qadri came across two spiritualists in Bikham Giri, a Bengali (tantric yogi) and Ahmed Ali Shah Qadri (a sufi). Both these gurus had a remarkable impact on young Qadri and taught him spiritual ideals through meditation, dance and music. His association with them at such a young age carved a lifelong commitment to spirituality and art. Qadri completed his Master's Degree in Fine Art from the Government College of Art, Simla in 1960 after which he began travelling around the world. Sohan Qadri merged non figurative painting with Eastern philosophy while simultaneously combining spirituality and art in his works on paper invoking a vision of meditative tranquility through vibrant motifs in his paintings. Often abandoning conventional paint mediums, Qadri is known to create ink and dye works on serrated paper that recurrently evoke the rich colours such as ochre, blue, crimson and saffron. Qadri altered large sheets of paper by covering the sheets with dense hues while using subtle variations of the same color. The rippled sheets of papers have an almost three-dimensional appearance. Due to this hybrid marriage of tantric imagery and late modernist minimalism in his works, Qadri earned him the title of the "Tantric yogi artist" from Francis Newton Souza.
Qadri has held over 40 solo shows across the globe and over a hundred group exhibitions in India and around the world, including the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa and Austria. Qadri has been exhibited at many authoritative National and International Art Fairs. He is an auction artist and has been extensively written about in publications and catalogues globally. His works have been included in numerous collections, including those of The Peabody Essex Museum- Massachusetts; The Rubin Museum of Art- New York; The National Gallery of Modern Art- New Delhi, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; as well as the private collections in Cologne, New York, Salem, New Jersey, Paris and India. He was the recipient of multiple awards such as I.A.P.A.A. Award, Toronto (1982) and an award in painting from Lalit Kala Akademi (1968).
A longtime resident of Copenhagen, Sohan Qadri passed away in Toronto, Canada, in 2011.