Multi-Armed Bi-head

Simultaneously surreal and emotively legible, Multi armed bi-head carries Nithiyendran’s signature expressive vibrancy shot through with mischievous humour. Created in the year of the Coronavirus, this work and its related installation, Avatar Towers, responded to the anxieties of 2020, and the social distancing imposed by the pandemic, with a celebration of multiplicity and metamorphosis.

Fascinated by syncretism and the strange and surprising visual forms it generates, Nithiyendran drew inspiration for Avatar Towers from the Gallery’s own collection of south and southeast Asian historical sculptures. He has also mentioned the impact on him, as a child, of fabulously embellished Hindu temple interiors. An ‘avatar’ in Hinduism is a worldly and material incarnation of a deity. But here, as in earlier sculptures, Nithiyendran presses playfully at the meanings of the word, hinting, through the presence of his own features in some of the sculptures, that the works are avatars of their maker – projections of Nithiyendran’s own spirit and energy into the lusciously glazed and bedazzled ‘mud’ that is his favoured medium.