Manjunath Kamath assembles iconography inspired by cultures across history into sculptures. Characters from Indian epic poems come together with motifs from Classical Greek architecture and Tang-dynasty China. Kamath does not reference any drawings when he works. He starts with a lump of clay and builds three-dimensional forms from his imagination.
“You see the sky,” Kamath said. “It’s endless. There are no boundaries for it. Similarly in my work, viewers look to identify an image, or the era, but they can’t find exactly what it is. Artworks have layers of meanings which can be infinitely peeled.”
Vikatonarva is a 12-foot-tall terracotta sculpture. Terracotta, which in Latin means “baked earth,” is the most common sculptural material around the world. Artists from Greece to Iran, China, and the Americas have worked in clay. The oldest terracotta figurines excavated from present-day India date from the seventh millennium BCE.
Kamath discovered terracotta as a boy—he passed a potter’s yard as he walked to school and watched as the artist pinched and coiled mounds of clay. There were no museums in Mangalore where Kamath grew up. Instead, he learned art history in temples and churches. He saw gods with thousands of hands. He saw towering terracotta animals. Despite not knowing what these icons meant, they stirred his imagination.
Vikatonarva depicts a man stepping toward the viewer, tangled in a headdress composed of branches and faces. His stoic gaze recalls the terracotta warriors who protect the tomb of China’s first emperor. His right hand resembles the shape of the karana mudra, a hand gesture believed to ward off evil in Buddhism. Vikatonarva may reference the Sanskrit words for “monstrous” or “boundless.” Kamath said he made up the name.
Artists have carved giant icons to inspire patriotism, devotion, hope, or nostalgia. Kamath constructed a fictional character. He improvised its motifs. The viewer may feel they recognize Kamath’s sources, but they cannot quite identify them.
Rather than finding the meaning of an artwork from a singular reference, Kamath’s work opens limitless possibilities. In this, he conveys the concept of infinity—an idea deeply embedded in Indian culture, where the theorization of “emptiness” and “void” laid the groundwork for the mathematical adoption of the number zero in the fifth century CE.
Vikatonarva manifests the philosophy behind LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries, where artworks from many world cultures are presented on the same floor. Like the motifs in Kamath’s sculpture, infinite connections can be discovered among them.
Dhyandra Lawson
2024
