Biography - by Brendan Flynn, Curator of Fine Art Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
Juginder Lamba was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1948. Perhaps, it was in these early years of his childhood that he acquired the African tradition of the materiality and the solidity of the earth. At the age of ten his family moved to India, but he took with him this attachment to the earth and soil and amalgamated it with the art, culture and ritual of the Hindu tradition with its ancient monuments and temple sculptures. The family emigrated to England in 1962 and he had to adjust, once more, to an entirely new social and cultural environment. He sees this very much as a period of his artistic awakening, and he began to paint. Perhaps the roots of Lamba’s art lie here, in the forms in these early paintings which were not to find full expression till much later. He graduated in Politics and Philosophy at Lancaster University in 1969 and soon after began to sculpt in wood, a medium in which he could fuse and reconcile the diversity of cultural influences and the physical locations and landscapes of his youth.
I first encountered Juginder Lamba’s work in 1989, at Walsall Art Gallery. When I walked into a quiet white room full of his work I was immediately captivated. Confronting me was a work called Acrobats, a life-size prone male figure supporting a vertical female figure who rose at right angles to him. With perfect poise and equilibrium, her weight was transmitted through his arms into his shoulders. Close by were other works- dark bird forms in Bronze Age bog oak, faintly sinister, emergent beings brought to life by the subtlest paring and polishing. In common with the human figures, they seemed to have a radiant energy- an elemental, primordial quality. They recalled the “personages” of Paul Nash, half formed natural entities lying dormant just below the surface of the conscious mind. In Resurrection, four clustered figures are fused into one dynamic arc, its surface dark as polished ebony. It is hard to distinguish where nature has stopped and the artist has begun, recognising and revealing a pre-existing power in the found object. In this sense the peat bog is a teeming habitat, a layered matrix of time, growth, death and memory- the central themes of Lamba’s work. There is a strong Surrealist element in these and the later Pod series. Forest Flower, with its blade like forms echoes the fossilised dream-forests of Max Ernst.
There is also a totemic quality, especially in the solitary upright and recumbent stone figures. The smooth, rounded, heavy stone limbs of Lady of Chambray carved from pale, Maltese limestone, has an archaic quality akin to the stone and terracotta idols of the Balearic Islands and Eastern Mediterranean. The human figure is represented in archetypal terms, purged of extraneous detail and transcending any single cultural or stylistic framework. In Stargazer, the life-size cherry wood figure stands serene, her feet firmly planted on the ground, her hands joined as she turns her face towards the stars. She represents the redeeming curiosity and dignity of humankind confronted by the immensity of the universe. In Enigma, the gaze is turned inwards, the figure opening itself to reveal its interior- a metaphor for both the inner self and the creative journey of the artist engaged in the intense and often painful act of self examination and expression.
