| Dinosaur, 2000, 70cm x 100cm, Oil on Canvas |
Dinosaur , 2000, 70cm x 100cm, Oil on Canvas
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About Artist Teja Astawa
While abstraction in painting is increasingly seen among contemporary Balinese artists, Teja Astawa practice keeps to the Balinese mainstream of figurative art. Born in 1970, Astawa graduated from the Indonesian College of Fine Arts (STSI) in Denpasar in 1990. Astawa has participated in group exhibitions in Bali and Jakarta since 1993. Bali in Bali is his second group exhibition in Singapore. Astawa lives and works in Sanur.
Astawa works in thematic series that draw their inspiration from subjects that range from the ducks that roam his yard to the wayang stories that nurtured his childhood. His style is characteristically na茂ve with a palette of vivid colours, a childlike manner of rendering figures in flat and simplified stylization, and a delightfully mischievous imagination.
Bali in Bali features Astawa paintings from his recently developed Wayang Series. Drawing from episodes, morality tales and characters from Hindu epics and Balinese equivalent of Aesop fables, Astawa brings to these stories that are the staple of Balinese art and image making his personalized interpretations replete with comic touches. Contemporary popular idioms weave through Astawa wayang paintings: a teddy bear hugging penakawan; Duryadana bearing a champion glass; a short-sighted Pandawa with black-rimmed spectacles; one of Men Brayut many children make mischief and run circles around her on an aeroplane.
Even so, in Astawa treatment of wayang characters there remains a faithfulness to basic wayang iconography that enables identification of the characters. Thus Arjuna of the Pandawa in Astawa painting Bisma Parwa is rendered with iconographically-correct almond-shaped eyes that signify the morally good and noble, while Duryadana of the Korawa has bulging eyes and coarse features that icongraphically posit him on the wrong side of morality. Even the Balinese pig in the series appropriates the stylistic mannerism of wayang kulit.
Naivety as a stylistic device in the history of Balinese art is first associated with the Young Artists Style which emerged in the late 1960s in the Penestanan area near Ubud. Astawa naivety is to be distinguished from the latter. Among young contemporary Balinese artists, there are not a few who have developed a kind of na茂ve treatment, and one might quickly think of the Yogyakarta-based Masriadi as one, whose stylistic naivety comes with a sharp edge of cynicism that points a dark comic finger at society. Astawa comic oeuvre is by distinction more childlike and innocent, seemingly to enjoy an internal curiosity and humour about the mundane things immediately surrounding him.
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