Far from moralising, Murni’s sexual imageries are wild and wide-ranging. Painted in bright, loud colours and a childlike, fantastical manner, her bold depictions of sex and erotic body parts strip away the secrecy and shame typically shrouding these explicit themes.
“In Murni’s art, it is not just naked bodies that shock, but naked female bodies. It is not just the naked female bodies, but their depiction in ways that completely defy any acceptable form of prettiness,” art historian Astri Wright wrote in 1999. Amid a culture that favoured women’s purity and passivity, people in Bali in the 1990s were accustomed to seeing the woman’s nude body as a commodity, a glossy object to obsess over: found in calendars that came from abroad, or erotica art by foreign men. Moreover, in the larger context of Indonesia’s predominantly Muslim society, sex and sexuality were rarely discussed publicly. Frank, grotesque expressions of a Balinese woman actively exploring and enjoying her body, in which the woman was no longer beholden to the male fantasy, were taboo—and consequently disturbed local audiences.
Previously trained in traditional mask-making, her wooden sculptures bear the vestiges of its original mask-form. While the medium and process might seem distinct, Untitled is thematically connected to her other oeuvres in the way that it showcases bold feminine sexual desire without the precarity that comes from being objectified.
Nonetheless, Murni never censored herself. “In my opinion, if my paintings happen to touch on so-called taboo subjects, why should I be ashamed?” she said.
Refusing to confine her creativity and sexuality within social convention, Murni subverted the ubiquitous male gaze and paved the way for other women within her context to centre their own subjectivity in their art—earning her the rightful label as a pioneer.