While many in the art world would argue that a lot of contemporary Indian art is churned out for the market, it doesn’t hold true for artists like Manjunath Kamath, who primarily works for himself. For his last show in Delhi in 2010, Kamath decided he would draw on the walls of Gallery Espace imagining it to be his studio space. He would sketch whenever and wherever irrespective of viewers’ presence and absence, engage in debates and discussions at the site with the curious onlookers. Called ‘Conscious-sub-conscious’, it was a project that came out of his heart for Kamath absolutely loves to draw.
“ I thought fibreglass is too synthetic to work with. I felt nothing can be as original and natural like terracotta ”
Four years later, Kamath is back with ‘Postponed Poems’ borne out of a deep desire. Leaving behind his digital ad minimalistic works, Kamath walks a different path, with sculptures in terracotta, classical imagery and a smaller scale. Brimming with love for Indian mythology, Kamath has been collecting artefacts right from childhood and this classical imagery forms the basis of the show that opens tomorrow. “I am looking at my roots but more than that it is also to do with the fact that I am bothered how in contemporary Indian art, our aesthetics have been replaced by Western aesthetics,” says Kamath, who studied sculpture at Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA) in Mysore.
In this show Kamath is showing 12 sculptures in terracotta besides paper works which include 30 small drawings, nine small Indian miniature-styled works and 15 gold leaf portraits drawing reference from the Buddhist Thangka paintings. “I have been collecting these objects for a very long time. Filled with things like wooden chariots, masks, figures etc., my studio looks like a museum. I meet craftsmen wherever I go,” explains Kamath, who took five years to create this body of work. “It is not easy to integrate classical imagery into one’s visual vocabulary because this particular imagery is so strong. I was trying to overcome this challenge and that’s what took me five years.”
The medium has also changed with time. For his last show ‘Collective Nouns’ in Mumbai, his collection of sculptures were in fibreglass and wood. “I thought fibreglass is too synthetic to work with. I felt nothing can be as original and natural like terracotta plus it has linkages with our civilisation and history. The best quality of terracotta is that it is most fragile but at the same time the most permanent as well.”
But the humour and wit, an essential component of his art practice, are intact but a bit subtle. “Just like how humour used to be in our miniatures –– subtle and suggestive, it is present in here also. There are no direct comments, no loud humour.” For instance in his work ‘Urdwalingakaratalamalaka’’, the sculpture drawing the reference from Urdwalinga Shiva (Shiva with erected gentile), a historical sculpture from 18th Century Badami temple, he takes a gentle dig at historians. “The portion till the torso is made using different things like an animal’s face, female breasts. It’s a kind of a mismatch situation, similar to when a historian joins broken sculptures found in excavations. It’s also like of re-writing history, a metaphor for the present situation where history has been manipulated according to different ideologies and belief.”
Then in a series of miniatures, he depicts an artist with moon, creating god and carrying out several other acts. In the study of innocent god rendered in gouache, Kamath wonders if god is innocent why does he need multiple heads and arms.
(“Postponed Poems” opens at Gallery Espace, Community Centre, New Friends Colony, till February 28. It is one of the collateral events of the upcoming India Art Fair.”)
