Manjunath Kamath
Manjunath Kamath |
The paper works of Manjunath Kamath have an ethereal rhythm in them. The images that he depicts pulsate with the music of a sepia tinted age. When the images pass through the alchemy of his imagination the quotidian gets transformed into the sublime. Everything is newsworthy there in his pictorial format. A no story becomes a story. A bit of journalistic imagination, a bit of cartoonists eye, a bit of designer’s sense of order and a bit of blue pencil holding editor’s severity- What do you need more to change the real into surreal?
Manjunath’s works on paper are rich in narratives. He calls them the condensed lessons on the art of story telling. To make his point right, of late his works on paper are called ‘Small Little Stories’. The number varies. At times he tells ten small little stories. And other times he tells hundred and eight stories. Now for www.artconcerns.com he tells five stories.
For the artist in Manjunath, stories are like icons. Story telling is an act of construction and deconstruction. Each time a story is told it gets a different meaning. Stories expand themselves to accommodate the location and time of its telling. Manjunath believes that as a visual artist, he needs to tell these stories in a different way. His visual articulation is one of the tools that he adopts for telling various stories at various times. He says that through painting, drawing, sculpting and video making he attempts at certain stories that are unique in content and articulation. “Perhaps, my video titled the ‘Happy Man and the Restless Cat’ is irreproducible in any other medium. Had I tried it on paper, it would have become something else,” says Manjunath.
Born in 1972 in Mangalore, Manjunath obtained his BFa in Sculpture from Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts, Mysore in 1989-94. He was the Artist in Residence at the School of Art and Desighn of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK in 2002. To know more about his recent works and working process visit our Close Up section. Manjunath lives and works in Delhi.
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