Ten years into his career as an artist, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran rarely feels nervous ahead of a new exhibition.
“I feel like I've just done it so much,” he laughs during a phone interview with Draw Your Box.
Having said that, Nithiyendran doesn’t take his success for granted. As he clarifies to us, there’s certainly an “exciting” feeling about showcasing his work on home soil, which is exactly what he’ll do when his solo exhibition, The Self Portrait and the Masks, opens in Sydney this week.
“I will say that it's always quite good or grounding to show a significant body of work in the place where you live, because that's when the people that you connect with the most can actually engage with your artwork,” he says.
“As an artist, you're often really embedded in a combination of highly technical and highly cerebral conversations with yourself and with a very small amount of people – my team – so actually having the opportunity to interact with people that I do normally, and show them what I do in the flesh, is quite exciting.”
As the Sri Lankan Australian artist explains to us, his last major exhibition was in Glasgow, UK in November 2023, with 105 individual works displayed in a 1,200 square metre space. Now almost a year later, The Self Portrait and the Masks marks his first solo exhibition in Australia since March 2023, and will feature dramatic new elements of his sculptural practice amongst bronze, paintings, drawings and ceramic sculptures.
“The key work in the show is a large self-portrait made from bronze, and it's the first time I've actually used the likeness in my face,” Nithiyendran explains.
With his eyes closed in the sculpture, the artist gestures towards the exploration of mortality. But overall, the self-portrait represents multiple themes.
“The idea of the self-portrait is actually a portrait of many things. It's a portrait of my cultural background, it’s a portrait of the aesthetic that I'm interested in,” he reflects. “There's lots of pop cultural references, and I think I'm playing with this idea that this individualistic notion of self-representation is actually counterintuitive with the opposite – there's actually embedded plurality.”
Nithiyendran has never shied away from exploring race, gender, religion and the human condition through his over 500 works to date. He says that as an artist, “you're always trying to develop your own work and develop your language”.
His love for art goes back to his childhood days, but he didn’t necessarily view it as a career option to begin with. He grew up in western Sydney after he and his family moved from Sri Lanka to Australia in 1989 as refugees.
“Despite coming from a highly visual cultural background and vernacular, art was just considered to be a cool hobby, rather than a profession. I didn't even have an idea that South Asian people [were doing art professionally], or even have anyone to look up to in the context of, you know, a South Asian artist making some kind of space in an industry context,” he says.
“I'm sure they existed in some capacity, but I never really saw my racial identity reflected in the space that I'm operating in now when I was younger.”
After studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts at university, it’s remarkable to see the incredibly successful career that Nithiyendran has forged, not only making the art world richer for it, but being that representation for other brown people in the process. Our conversation reminds him of this.
“My parents were Tamil refugees. I grew up in Auburn, working class, Dartbrook Road [in Auburn], you know, like near McDonald's. I wasn't taken to galleries. I wasn't taken to museums,” he says. “So I didn't actually emerge into university or even into a professional art setting with the kind of social literacy that say, people who might have had a different class background or upbringing, might have had.
“So, on a very kind of vocational level, I never really thought I would get to the stage where I am, if that makes sense.
“And it's only when I have a show coming up, and people ask me about my career that I kind of get reminded that I seem to have some kind of visibility or success, or what people may deem to be success in the industry.”
While he creates over 70 artworks a year and is well-versed in helming an exhibition, Nithiyendran is as humble as they come – and that is perhaps his greatest superpower.
Sullivan+Strumpf presents The Self Portrait and the Masks, opening Thursday September 12 until Saturday October 12, 2024.