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Lot Essay
It is often noted that women are often main actors in Hendra's paintings. Women dressing in the traditional batik served as the artist's palette demonstrating his unique sense of colours. A critic once commented that "Hendra's are nourishing, nursing, mothering beauties, voluptuously busty, their undulating bodies wrapped in bright-coloured cloth. Their forms are echoed by the form of papayas, often competing with strutting eggplants and cucumbers. They are young and their long graceful arms, exaggerating the elegant hand-movements that are so typically Indonesian, contrasting with their thick feet wide-spaced toes - the feet of villagers and farmers." (Astri Wright, Painting the People).
Female figure has never ceased as a source of constant inspiration to artists of all generations. In Flower vendors, Hendra is again paying his tribute to the beauty and strength of the women. Because of his own preoccupation with the Indonesian people as a community, the beauty of the women is never sensual, but he uses colours to distinct the earthy and natural role of women as mothers of children and as mothers of the land, portraying them always in the role of a provider, immortalised in an act of perpetual nurturing.
A sense of a community, ever in conversation, interacting and exchanging is yet another inherent characteristic in the works of Hendra. This sense of multi-linked interaction is always achieved with the artist's meticulous arrangement of the boisterous crowd amidst a riot of colours, noise and objects and the interaction is always suggested with a touch, a look or a gesture, a link that goes in circle and never broken.
Another interesting note with Flower vendors is the rather unusual treatment of the element of light by Hendra. Light is not commonly used by the artist to accentuate a central figure but with the present lot, Hendra uses the brightness of the flowers that light up the lower central segment of the canvas, achieving almost a theatrical effect of drawing an instantaneous attention of the viewer.
Astri Wright writes that "it is no doubt that Hendra is one of two or three greatest pioneers of modern Indonesian art: a man whose work may contain visual elements borrowed from Europe but whose synthesis is to complete that he is experienced as the 'Indonesian' painter par excellence; a man infatuated with his country's and his people's beauty, vitality and sensuality and who spent his whole life celebrating it, a Gauguin who did not leave his country to find his paradise." (Astri Wright, Painting the People)
Female figure has never ceased as a source of constant inspiration to artists of all generations. In Flower vendors, Hendra is again paying his tribute to the beauty and strength of the women. Because of his own preoccupation with the Indonesian people as a community, the beauty of the women is never sensual, but he uses colours to distinct the earthy and natural role of women as mothers of children and as mothers of the land, portraying them always in the role of a provider, immortalised in an act of perpetual nurturing.
A sense of a community, ever in conversation, interacting and exchanging is yet another inherent characteristic in the works of Hendra. This sense of multi-linked interaction is always achieved with the artist's meticulous arrangement of the boisterous crowd amidst a riot of colours, noise and objects and the interaction is always suggested with a touch, a look or a gesture, a link that goes in circle and never broken.
Another interesting note with Flower vendors is the rather unusual treatment of the element of light by Hendra. Light is not commonly used by the artist to accentuate a central figure but with the present lot, Hendra uses the brightness of the flowers that light up the lower central segment of the canvas, achieving almost a theatrical effect of drawing an instantaneous attention of the viewer.
Astri Wright writes that "it is no doubt that Hendra is one of two or three greatest pioneers of modern Indonesian art: a man whose work may contain visual elements borrowed from Europe but whose synthesis is to complete that he is experienced as the 'Indonesian' painter par excellence; a man infatuated with his country's and his people's beauty, vitality and sensuality and who spent his whole life celebrating it, a Gauguin who did not leave his country to find his paradise." (Astri Wright, Painting the People)