Gajah Gallery is proud to present Ashley Bickerton, Erizal As, Jane Lee, Rudi Mantofani, and Yunizar: five visual artists from South East Asia who encapsulate the region’s diverse and multifaceted cultural landscape, at Art Basel Hong Kong 2021 – featuring for the first time in the Satellite Booth format. In this presentation, Gajah Gallery focuses on the diversity of thought and practice among these artists’ works, which invite fresh perspectives grounded in social, historical, and critical concerns.
Gajah Gallery will exhibit recent paintings by renowned artist Ashley Bickerton, whose ever-evolving body of work has drawn the attention of collectors and critics since the mid-1980s. His latest paintings bring together strands of multiple series; tying together themes and motifs that have remained constant over decades of practice, and creating an extraordinarily calibrated critique of beauty, sexuality, tribalism, modernity, and a bitterly aware, almost hopeless urban lust for the unattainably exotic.
Singaporean artist Jane Lee is known for her bold and inventive techniques and innovative use of materials. Employing various methods of physical transformation, Lee redefines the parameters of painting, approaching each element from the paint itself to the stretcher bar, in unconventional ways. Operating in a post-colonial Southeast Asian context, Lee re-examines the significance of Western painting practices while asserting her own culture and affirming the universality of contemporary art.
Indonesian artists Erizal As, Rudi Mantofani and Yunizar have been influential figures in the growth and expansion of contemporary art in Indonesia. Known for his highly charged, abstract expressionist paintings, Erizal As trained at the Indonesian Institute of Fine Art, and has shown in various exhibitions in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore.
Rudi Mantofani challenges viewers to reflect on ordinary objects, the environment, and surrounding landscapes through painting and sculpture, creating puzzling visual cues that play with perception. This overturning of reality is done with daring visual ploys such as flattening the pictorial space through heavy repetitions or creating illusions of three-dimensionality. His work entices the viewer into a playful dialogue on the act of seeing and interpreting imagery and reality.
Yunizar continues to captivate international audiences through the spontaneity and originality of his paintings and sculptures. He employs organic forms to create sophisticated renderings of portraits, landscapes, and still life that have earned him a distinct place in public and private collections across the world. Like his paintings, Yunizar’s sculptures similarly tilt towards the whimsical and absurd. His work brings to mind images of childlike doodles and scribbles, rendered in imaginative physical forms through the bronze medium. Both Mantofani and Yunizar are founding members of Kelompok Seni Rupa Jendela (KSR Jendela), an influential collective of contemporary visual artists based in Yogyakarta.
Art Basel Hong Kong: Live
19 – 23 May 2021
www.artbasel.com/ovr
The Satellite Booth with be accompanied by a digital presentation through Art Basel Hong Kong’s OVR format, featuring Ashley Bickerton, Erizal As, Jane Lee, Rudi Mantofani, Suzann Victor and Yunizar.
