Indonesia foremost contemporary painter Nyoman Masriadi will hold his first solo exhibition in the United States on April 7. This is actually the first large-scale exhibition of the artist since his show at the Singapore Art Museum in 2008. While Masradi was first attracted by abstraction and then cubism, his style move toward what has become his signature full-bodied figures with their disproportionately large hands and feet and caricatured faces that give his work a cartoon-like feel reflecting current pop culture. While he told me in an interview in 2007 that video games have had no impact on his work, he does concede that comic book superheroes have left their imprint on him, saying that he has always been fascinated with the colour black which reminds him of Batman’s cape - his larger than life characters often have ebony skin.
Masriadi’s paintings frequently depict superhuman figures whose narratives, while rooted in Indonesian cultural history, offer witty and often biting social commentary on contemporary life and global pop culture. Through his expert control of light, shadow and volume, he endows these monumental characters with a sculptural, almost three-dimensional presence. Sometimes these characters appear in the archetypal roles of comic book heroes, cowboys, soldiers and athletes, but just as frequently, they are simply powerfully built men and women engaged in solitary acts of strength or captured in private moments of vulnerability.
He is the subject of a major new monograph, Nyoman Masriadi: Reconfiguring the Body, with an essay by the art historian T.K. Sabapathy.