OUT of SIGHT - Gregorius Sidharta • Sudjana Kerton • Salim
OUT of SIGHT unearths works by three largely overlooked modern artists. They were trailblazers who helped us understand that artists do not need to conform to trends and fads to thrive. They did not falter in their respective chosen paths. Instead, they forged individual distinctive styles, cemeting their places in Indonesian art history.
Gregorius Sidharta (1932-2006) is widely known for his sculptures. Lesser seen are his later ‘blue period’ realist figural paintings replete with daringness and unconventionality. Sudjana Kerton (1922-1994) is a painter of commoners and the everyday, unsurprisingly given how he rigorously observed life round him. Yet, not many would have noticed how he constructed representational forms out of lines stacked and juxtaposed together. Salim (1908-2008) was born in North Sumatra but spent most of his adult life in Paris, where his distinct jagged cubist visual language and loose adherence to abstraction made him an iconoclast amongst his peers.
There are things that we easily forget once they leave our sight, but the works of these artists should not slip from our minds as we celebrate the spirit of tenacity they bore to become who they wanted to be.