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Lot Essay
The striking visual imageries in this lot by Indonesian painter EddiE haRA points to a distinctly derived aesthetics strongly influenced by the aesthetics of animation and comic. With figures and other pictorial elements rendered flat on a two-dimensional surface, as well as the intentionally distinct strong outline employed, this is a work that is exemplary of the artist's visual explorations of the recent two years.
Born in 1957 in Salatiga, Indonesia, EddiE haRA has lived and worked out of Basel, Switzerland since 1997. He occasionally returns to Indonesia for exhibitions. He was educated at the Indonesian Institute of Art (ISI) Yogyakarta from 1980 to 1989 before furthering art studies at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunst Enschede (AKI) in the Netherlands. In the last two years, he has developed a body of paintings and mural works that often appear wildly colourful, with disparate symbols, figures and text all coalesced into a singular and distinctive visual appearance.
Although his works have been compared to the works of artists from the Art Brut and outsider art movements in Europe, they are differentiated from and independent of these respective contexts. For one, EddiE haRA's paintings are conscious and reactive to issues in everyday life, particularly when it concerns the environment or other lobbyist issues. Secondly, they bear a certain compositional coherence and orderliness and thematic distillation that cannot be achieved through the spontaneous and unconscious modes by which Art Brut and outsider art is characteristically defined.
Indeed EddiE haRA, like his monogrammatic artist's signature, is a self-fashioned crusader for issues and concerns related to the environment as well as other important issues that activists around the work take part in and raise a cause for. This lot belongs to a series of work featured in EddiE haRA's Global Warming, Cool Art! exhibition held in Nadi Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia in 2007. In the exhibition, the artist marked his re-emergence into the Indonesian art scene, having been based in Basel for a period of time. The gallery's white walls provided the space for the execution of graffiti-style mural, what with the bright, neon colours employed and the distinctive flatness of pictorial imageries incorporated with text.
Having always been known to be an artist keenly aware of cultural and environmental politics worldwide, the works in the exhibition refer obliquely to the green movement and quietly endorse the particular self-fashioning of the artist as artist-activist. In this lot, there is a re-inscribing of his commitment to an activist stance, drawing upon art's non-partisanship to articulate his concern for the environment and other currently relevant global issues.
Born in 1957 in Salatiga, Indonesia, EddiE haRA has lived and worked out of Basel, Switzerland since 1997. He occasionally returns to Indonesia for exhibitions. He was educated at the Indonesian Institute of Art (ISI) Yogyakarta from 1980 to 1989 before furthering art studies at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunst Enschede (AKI) in the Netherlands. In the last two years, he has developed a body of paintings and mural works that often appear wildly colourful, with disparate symbols, figures and text all coalesced into a singular and distinctive visual appearance.
Although his works have been compared to the works of artists from the Art Brut and outsider art movements in Europe, they are differentiated from and independent of these respective contexts. For one, EddiE haRA's paintings are conscious and reactive to issues in everyday life, particularly when it concerns the environment or other lobbyist issues. Secondly, they bear a certain compositional coherence and orderliness and thematic distillation that cannot be achieved through the spontaneous and unconscious modes by which Art Brut and outsider art is characteristically defined.
Indeed EddiE haRA, like his monogrammatic artist's signature, is a self-fashioned crusader for issues and concerns related to the environment as well as other important issues that activists around the work take part in and raise a cause for. This lot belongs to a series of work featured in EddiE haRA's Global Warming, Cool Art! exhibition held in Nadi Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia in 2007. In the exhibition, the artist marked his re-emergence into the Indonesian art scene, having been based in Basel for a period of time. The gallery's white walls provided the space for the execution of graffiti-style mural, what with the bright, neon colours employed and the distinctive flatness of pictorial imageries incorporated with text.
Having always been known to be an artist keenly aware of cultural and environmental politics worldwide, the works in the exhibition refer obliquely to the green movement and quietly endorse the particular self-fashioning of the artist as artist-activist. In this lot, there is a re-inscribing of his commitment to an activist stance, drawing upon art's non-partisanship to articulate his concern for the environment and other currently relevant global issues.