Mahirwan Mamtani is painter, graphic and multimedia artist.
Mahirwan Mamtani
Mamtani grew up in India, studied there and moved 1966 to Germany, where he had been awarded a scholarship by DAAD to study painting at the Kunstakademie. Since that time he lives and works in and around Munich.
Already at the beginning of his studies, Mamtani was aware of Kandinsky, one of the groundbreakers of modernism, who had been searching for spiritual dimensions in art. For Mamtani it can go as far back as William Blake in the 18th century or extend to a German contemporary like Joseph Beuys, who was influenced by the anthroposophic teachings of Rudolf Steiner.
In Munich, in the Sixties, he was influenced by CONSTRUCTIVISM, and with his Indian background, by Tantra art. Out of these origins arose his “Centrovision” series, which - already in 1990 - consisted of more than 3000 works.
Some of his earlier multimedia projects were graphic animation films: CENTROVISION and FACES (1982). Starting in 1990 he built upon an idea from earlier (1985) works, where he had begun to let faces appear in some of his artwork. He performed dances wearing several mandala masks, which he had painted on wood, and recorded these dances in the form of photos and videos with the help of a self-timer. He then painted over the surface of the resulting photo sheets with acrylic colours, creating a series of new mixed-media works of art which he called "Transmuted Fotos". During that time he also experimented with other mixed media.
From the year 2000 onwards, Mamtani created "Mandala Conscious Beings" where he focused on figurative paintings using mandala masks as central elements. This was driven by his urge to deal with human emotions. His remarks were "We all are constantly wearing masks. We are changing the masks, but not removing them."
Around 2003, he also started working on earlier dance videos, recomposing them into new clips.