If you want to build an office block, housing estate or a shopping mall in Denmark, 1.5 per cent of the total build cost has to be spent on a public work of art.

It need not necessarily be an outdoors piece — it could be inside the mall instead of those ubiquitous fountains and miniature jungles—but be there it must, if planning permission is to be granted.

In many states in the US and in France the figure is one per cent, while in the Netherlands it can be as high as two per cent, a substantial commission on a building costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

The investment group Actis, which is putting the finishing touches to its $250 million Garden City development off Thika Road outside Nairobi's city centre, should therefore be congratulated for commissioning public art without the stick of a planning permit to drive them.

Art for a permit is not yet demanded in Kenya, although hopefully that will change.

And Actis should be further praised for having the sensitivity and courage to commission works from two of the region’s leading artists — Peterson Kamwathi and Maggie Otieno, with more to follow — that represent robust adventures in public sculpture.

Garden City is a huge project. Featuring more than 400 townhouses and apartments, plus offices and a vast shopping mall, it will also have its own hotel and a three acre leisure park with an auditorium and playgrounds. The first phase is set to open in May.

It is fair to say that Actis has been well rewarded for its investment in art. It has received not only an attraction for visitors, but what I think is lasting sculpture of high quality — pieces that speak to us all and would sit well in the grounds of any national gallery.

Garden City’s directors reached Kamwathi and Otieno through Danda Jaroljmek of Circle Art of Nairobi, following auctions of paintings and sculpture the agency held at a city hotel... the latest example of a business committed to East African art ensuring it is put firmly on the map.

A background feature of Circle’s auctions and exhibitions has been the sponsorship Jaroljmek arranged from such blue chip companies as Porsche and Jaguar, the champagne makers Moet and Chandon, vodka firm Absolut and banks including I&M and CfC Stanbic — clear and confident statements about high end companies wanting to add lustre to their brands through their association with East African art.

Jaroljmek drew up a shortlist of artists and the Actis directors then invited them to submit ideas and made their choice.

Kamwathi’s sculpture was put on site last week (the grounds around it now have to be landscaped) and delivery of Otieno’s piece is expected any day now.
What is clear even at this stage is that Kamwathi has produced a blockbuster sculptural grouping.

Called Viewfinders, it is of 12 sheets of steel, from which have been cut human figures. Only the voids remain, the spaces they once occupied. The figures continue to exist in their own negative space.

Each within a rectangle of 2.4 metres by 1.1 metres, the figures are arranged at the centre of a large depression forming a shallow bowl.

The sculpture is site specific, with the rectangular outline of each steel sheet echoing the right angles of the buildings that stand in a semi-circle around the rim of the bowl.

The figures themselves are grouped in a rough tear-shape, with a cluster of six followed by three, then two and the single remaining rectangle set some six metres away across a path and halfway up a small embankment, overlooking the main group.

Because Viewfinders is an outdoor sculpture, on sunny days it casts shifting shadows that add to the dynamics of the installation.

The figures are of wananchi, sketched and then stylised for the sculpture. They are all of adults and include a pregnant woman, a girl with a topknot, a casual labourer in boots, an office worker, one man with a trilby and another with a flat cap.

They are people from all walks of life; they are us.

Although the figures are roughly human in scale, the rectangles containing them tower above you. It makes moving among them, as visitors are sure to do — for pleasure or to be photographed through the voids — a strangely timeless experience, rather like walking through an ancient monument like Stonehenge. It is as though these figures have always existed and just needed prising from their past to be among us now.

Its name Viewfinders is significant for the way the piece expresses a way forward and glimpses our future, as a cosmopolitan community of different peoples and races, each with its core values and creeds; some shared, some distinct.

The many colours of the individual figures speak of the richness that comes from diversity, which can be extrapolated as a metaphor for the desirability of religious and political pluralism.

Kamwathi is not generally thought of as a colourist but is known chiefly for his series of sonorous charcoal drawings and incisive brush and ink studies of single figures, groups and queues.

Yet some of his later drawings used colour both economically and effectively, with backgrounds that ranged from an icy Tiffany blue, through lemon yellows, soft pastel greens and a delicate shade of rust. Colour could be seen too in the steel figures he produced that led to this current group.

More like 3D drawings than sculptures, they were gas-cut from steel sheets, followed the lines of his brush and were finished in a pearlescent grey, yellow, black and a glowing blood red.

Those were positive cut-outs, yet the current negative voids are similarly enhanced by colour — a fire house red, primary yellow, the deepest of greens, purple, lilac, greys, gold, silver and blues — and thus become a subtle statement of our joint direction.

The idea of cutting a human figure from a steel sheet and exhibiting the void is not new, any more than carving a head from wood or marble is new.
The sculptor selects whatever material and method will offer a perfect realisation of the concept.

The American Jonathan Borofsky has made several voids of his iconic Man with a Briefcase; one of which, some 15 metres high, stands in a public square in Fort Worth, Texas.

Borofsky’s colossus is specific as a symbol of the white collar worker, lifting him from the huddled masses and giving him his own identity and value. It is a shout for the American concern with the triumph of individual will; an image that recurs in his work.

What is exciting about Kamwathi’s Viewfinders is the way they articulate a particularly African statement about the collective power of the community; a group that shares its knowledge and works together through unity to success.

Thus Kamwathi’s voids offer a very African expression of identity and the communal ownership of ideals.

Rooted in the continent, they, through the commonality of fellowship, achieve an international relevance.

This is consistent with Kamwathi’s oeuvre; in his Sitting Allowance and Queue drawings, his pictures of demonstrators called Monuments to a Vessel and more recently his Position series of people at prayer, he has always been interested in the interaction of groups and crowds.

Now with this virtuoso piece of public art, perhaps it is the crowds who will show interest in his work; and in Kamwathi himself, as an artist whose work speaks of their past, their cultures and now points to a path for their future.

Tuko pamoja: We are together.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi.