Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran stands beside his new exhibition’s hero piece, “Self Portrait with Masks” (2024). You could never accuse Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran of being understated. The Sydney-based contemporary artist radiates an exuberance in life and in work. Audacious and politically charged, his genre-defying sculptures explore themes of gender, eroticism, religion and popular culture — all in hypercolour — and this latest exhibition probes the motif of the mask and the intricacies of
self-representation.
This year marks a decade of professional art practice for Nithiyendran, who studied painting at the University of New South Wales’s College of Fine Arts before shifting much of his focus to ceramics. His new exhibition, “The Self Portrait and the Masks”, which runs until October 12 at Sullivan+Strumpf gallery in Sydney, expands on his material exploration, with ambitious new works in bronze.
The central work is a large-scale, multi-limbed, robotic-like figure, painted in psychedelic hues. Its eyes are closed, like a cyborg deep in contemplation. On closer viewing, it’s Nithiyendran’s face, cast in bronze and surrounded by a constellation of wall-mounted bronze masks originally made from cardboard.
For an artist frequently the subject of his own work, Nithiyendran once struggled with his identity. He moved to Australia from Sri Lanka with his family as refugees during the civil war in the late 1980s. He was less than a year old at the time, and grew up during the emergence of politician Pauline Hanson, whose maiden speech to parliament included that famous claim of Australia being “swamped by Asians”.
“I wasn’t necessarily proud of being from that region, if you know what I’m saying, and, because I didn’t have any memories of it physically, there was no kind of sentimentality around it until I went to university,” he says.
“This whole idea of South Asian representation in art didn’t even play into my mind before that, because it didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem that you could have a contemporary artist that was from a South Asian background practising. I didn’t grow up going to galleries or anything like that. I came from a very working-class background and there were no people in my extended family who worked in creative industries. I was a really academic child, but there was definitely an artistic side.”
Art became a vehicle for Nithiyendran’s cultural reconnection.
“That’s when I started to become politicised and to learn about the structures of representation and the systems that impact how some people’s careers are naturalised,” he says. “I looked at ethics and exhibitions and curatorial strategies with more rigour and detail, and that’s when I noticed that the South Asian diaspora, and even the Asian diaspora, was very seldom represented within a contemporary art space at that point in time.”
Nithiyendran’s work is helping to close that gap. His art is held in various private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Art Gallery of South Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art. His first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and Europe, “Idols of Mud and Water”, launched last year at Tramway in Glasgow and resulted in a significant acquisition by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Fine Arts in New Delhi.
There’s childlike playfulness in much of Nithiyendran’s art. His figurative sculptures often appear as anthropomorphic idols — wildly misshapen and layered with vivid colour, they meld the past with the present.
“For one of the sculptures in my new show, I used two-pack car paint,” he explains. “I was thinking about a type of contemporary veneration and, this sounds a bit silly, but I was thinking about the ways in which people pimp their ride or make their cars idiosyncratic or a site of creativity or luxury. I thought using that language was an interesting way to treat bronze casting, which is something that has 6,000 years of history, which started in religion.”
The framework of religion, and its application in contemporary society, is an ongoing point of interest for Nithiyendran.
“There are various fields in contemporary society that are perceived to be outside organised religion,” he says. “The way in which humans might organise themselves to idolise or worship certain types of bodies, or celebrities, or TikTok people, or chefs, or whatever, and I think some of the fundamental components of the way religion is structured is based on creating idealised imagery that then gets activated by certain rituals.
“I think that can be translated to many things in contemporary society, and not all of them are positive, but some are just creative,” he adds. “I think there’s something innate about human societies to have these activities, but what I’m primarily interested in is the system of representations embedded in those activities.”
Nithiyendran often explores representations of Hinduism in his work.
Multi-armed deities, the fluidity of avatars and the blue skin of Vishnu represent what he describes as “a kind of wild imagination”.
“In the idea of an avatar, which has foundations in Sanskrit and in Hindu mythology, a lot of the gods or the deities exist in various forms, and I’m quite inspired by the fact that, in contemporary society, our identity is predicated upon various avatars through social media and through the way we depict ourselves socially,” he says. “Within my current work, I was looking at drawing a connection to the rich traditions of masks, firstly as they relate to my ancestry, where masks hang on walls and are highly adorned and have a very specific societal function, like scaring away the evil eye.”
“But I was also thinking about the fact that people can relate to this idea of the mask in a multitude of ways,” he continues. “It can be ritual based, it can be personal. It’s about trying to bring such a loaded symbol in contemporary society and giving it a historical and a personal dimension. It feels a little bit existential in some ways, but I don’t think it’s meant to be. It’s a site to show multiplicity, because in a way, the sculptures can be many things. You can swap the masks around.”
Nithiyendran’s attraction to highly saturated colour stems from his background in painting, but there’s also a political edge to this interest.
“I think the lens I bring to all of these works is highly influenced by a language of painting and a methodology of painting but, from a cultural perspective, I’m quite interested in the way certain colour schemes actually have social and ideological functions,” he says.
This interest extends to colonial perceptions of people from “other cultures”, where colourful adornment was often viewed as a marker of being “less civilised”.
“I think playing with this notion and bringing that into a mainstream context makes it quite mundane,” he says. “If you look at it from a regional perspective, in a South Asian context, being highly adorned, having a big colour palette, is not necessarily remarkable. It’s actually quite unremarkable. I think it’s about trying to create some discussion about what people perceive to be austere or intellectual or anti-intellectual or hyper-emotional. Colour can have a lot of connotations.”
While colour is a permanent fixture in his work, Nithiyendran has been experimenting with scale. His exhibition at Tramway, for example, featured a 10-metre-tall idol moulded from Glasgow mud. “Scale is something I’m interested in almost as a medium, and I’m thinking about how you can use scale and size to convey certain ideas and explore things,” he says. “I think, especially within some western contemporary art discourses, working large seems to be a little bit crass and there’s a lot of critiques circulating around monumental monuments in public space. That links to a lot of postcolonial critique of the histories of large sculptures in those public spaces.”
Nithiyendran’s exploration of scale serves as a kind of antidote to this. He’s interested in monuments that have the poetic effect of bringing people together. “The giant reclining Buddhas aren’t about domination and claiming land,” he states.
The central work in “The Self Portrait and the Masks” has a similar sense of transcendence.
“It’s the first figure whose eyes are actually closed,” says Nithiyendran. “And its arms are outstretched. Historically, from the regions I’m interested in or connected to, the representation of guardianship often has more of a pronounced or hyperbolic or exaggerated stance, whereas I wanted to have a stance that seemed really peaceful with this work.
“That was something I was trying to do — to have the figure appear peaceful and comfortable, despite looking somewhat bionic and scribbled on and made of bronze and bricks and cardboard and Play-Doh.”
