A major new exhibition from Ramesh is opening in Sydney

WORDS Cassandra Dimitroff PHOTOGRAPHY Mark Pokorny and Bowen Arico PUBLISHED Thu, 18 Jul 2024 - 5:00 pm

You don't have to be an art insider to know about Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. He's an acclaimed Sri-Lankan Australian visual artist whose work you'd likely have interacted with before – whether at the front entranceway of AGNSW, on the mantlepiece of Troye Sivan's Architectural Digest home tour, or bypassing one of his larger-than-life sculptures at Dark Mofo in Hobart, or as part of the VIVID Sydney Light Walk.

Ramehs's totem-like sculptures span across various mediums, from bronze casts to LED lights, and have garnered the artist a devout following both on social media and in the art world. As someone interested in global histories and languages of figurative representation, he's perhaps best known for his ultra-contemporary approach to ceramic media, and his work is held in the collections of major museums and galleries across Australia and Asia.

Excitingly for Sydney art lovers, after a series of successful projects in the UK, Ramesh will be opening his next Australian solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf's gallery in Zetland; his first since March 2023.

The exhibition, entitled 'The Self Portrait and the Masks' will be opening later this year, and will explore the loaded cultural motif of the mask and what it means today.

It introduces dramatic new elements of his sculptural practice – including an ambitious new major artwork featuring cast self-portraits. A first for Nithiyendran, within The Self Portrait and the Masks the artist cast his own face in the context of a mixed-media installation which comprises bronze, paintings, drawings and ambitious ceramic sculptures.

Within this exhibition, he extends his explorations of religious iconographies connected to his Sri Lankan ancestry by nodding self-consciously to the politics of self-representation.