Moksh Dham (Abstract Face) Terracotta Religious Sculpture

Set against a velvety black ground, this relief reads like an excavated talisman—part icon, part architectural fragment—where a solemn, masklike visage presides over a stacked terrain of compartments, vents, and inscrutable markings. Warm ochres and rusted reds are interrupted by tarnished greens, as if time itself has oxidized the surface, turning history into patina and memory into texture. The vertical composition pulls the eye downward through thresholds and apertures, suggesting a passage from the realm of the seen to the buried and coded—an altar of forgotten machines or a shrine to inherited myths. In its tight, totemic compression of face, façade, and relic, the work meditates on how identity is built from layers: worn, repaired, and quietly enduring.