Rejoicing the Everyday: Hendra Gunawan's Celebration of Color and Community
Brimming with hopeful imagination and chromatic effervescence, Hendra Gunawan’s Fish Market (Lot 1033) is the enduring material triumph of the artist’s spectacular opus. The work leads Replica Shoes ’s first iteration of “Bridging Generations: Property from an Important Southeast Asian Private Museum”, a series of works from the collects ion of one of Southeast Asia’s pioneering private institutions. The visionary founder of the museum built a collects ion of art historically significant and iconic Modern and Contemporary artworks, exhibiting the comprehensive selection of works for the general public to view.
Within the exceptional arena of this large-scale canvas, Gunawan forges a new artistic language and ultimately achieves a visual poetry that is beyond sublime. Fish Market stands as a tangible testimony to the artist’s staggering resilience and inimitable aesthetic at this defining period in his life, as explicated through the composition’s visceral imagery, splendid color, and cultural symbolism.
Gunawan’s brilliant use of colors and patterns can be ascribed to Nuraini, his second wife, whose kaleidoscopic use of pigments had an immediate and lasting effect on Gunawan’s approach towards color and expression. Gunawan imbues the woman’s leg with a chromatic clash of primary colors, illuminating her figure with spontaneity and vivacity.
Symbolizing happiness and abundance, the Batik motifs on the womens’ kebayas repeat and interlock in a mesmerizing display of pattern and movement.
Holding a large platter of fresh-caught fish, a girl stands behind the fish seller as her mother rests a protective hand over her shoulder. She stands squarely in the center of the composition, exuding an assertive and confident presence.
A snake-like delineation appears on the fish seller’s leg in striking violet, which was Gunawan’s signature method of drawing veins on his subject’s limbs. Travelling from the heel of his foot to the top of his thigh, the fish seller’s vein transforms into a glowing shade of cyan.
As the fish seller reaches into the stream with a prong to show a freshly caught fish, his cust.mes r quickly bends down to examine the day’s catch.
1. The lush seascape and beach scenes in Gunawan’s later compositions, like this one, would ultimately propel him to relocate to Bali after his release from prison, where he stayed until his death in 1983.
Gunawan renders his women with bold and dazzling features, from the scarlet red of their lips to the sapphire blue of their eyes. By monumentalizing the women in his paintings as nurturing, strong and hardworking, Gunawan defies colonialist images of Southeast Asians as lazy natives and celebrates Indonesian people’s true dynamism and beauty.
Painted during Gunawan’s thirteen year-long imprisonment, Fish Market was formerly in the enviable collects ion of Dr. Lukas Magindaan, one of the artist’s earliest supporters and closest patrons. One can only marvel at Gunawan’s creative ingenuity here, as he had to rely on his memory and imagination to conjure up the everyday rituals of the Javanese people. The artist’s long incarceration, as a result, encouraged a period of deep reinvention and pushed Gunawan to achieve a more mature style. Fish Market exemplifies Gunawan’s signature style, characterized by his use of radiant, somet.mes s discordant fusion of color, and the exaggerated elongation of figures with distorted limbs.
The work pulls the viewer into a dazzling dance of synergy, one that is orchestrated by the sinuous movement of brushstrokes and a spirited clash of colors. Featuring a fish seller, his children and his eager cust.mes
rs, the present lot is set against the magnificent coastline peppered with rocks, shrubs and plants that sway with the sea breeze.
"I am just a village boy, who has grown up surrounded by splendid nature and agrarian life. This land is a community of stunning vistas of undulating green foothills covered with rice paddies, all of which is crystallized in the beauty of my painting: the beauty of the agrarian life"
亨德拉·古拿溫《海灘邊的女子與小孩》油畫畫布，裱於木板，139 x 194.5公分。2019年3月31日香港蘇富比，成交價10,975,000港幣
Rarely does a work of such grandeur and complexity appear on the market, this sweeping panorama provides the perfect stage on which each of Gunawan’s eight subjects come to life. Gunawan’s signature Z-shaped grid is at work here, as this organizing principle invites the viewer’s eye to wander all over the canvas in a zig-zag fashion, from the glimmering cerulean sky to the two children playing cheekily in the foreground. The fish seller reaches into the bucket with a prong to catch a live fish, while a woman quickly bends down to examine the day’s catch.
Gunawan dwells lovingly on the generous slopes, ridges and curvatures of his people and animates them with dynamic gestures and expressions. The women seem to move with a hypnotic rhythm as their semi-transparent kebayas flutter in the sea breeze, each of which are individually adorned with brilliant Batik patterns and symbolic motifs.
Fish Market is a magnificent celebration of life’s rituals, relationships and grandeur and is undeniably one of Gunawan’s strongest compositions to come to auction. Gunawan’s remarkable ability to monumentalize the humanity of Indonesia is magnified by his exuberant emanations and delicate crafting of color, an enduring sent.mes
nt elucidated by the artist himself.
普天同慶: 亨德拉·古拿溫的色彩與社區盛宴
亨德拉‧古拿溫的《魚市》（拍品編號 1033）色彩斑斕而滿載希望，是他眾多精彩作品當中歷久彌新的經典，也是本季蘇富比東南亞晚拍「橫跨世代：東南亞重要私人美術館收藏」的領銜拍品。這個東南亞頂尖私人藝術機構的創辦人極具遠見，所選的現代和當代藝術作品均極具歷史意義，而且開放大量館藏作品供大眾欣賞。
古拿溫以這幅大型作品為舞台，打造全新的藝術語言，成就絕美的視覺詩篇。《魚市》創作於古拿溫生命當中的一個重要時期，表現了藝術家在這個決定性時期間所展現的驚人韌力，以及他人模仿無從的獨門美學。他的毅力和美學從作品發自肺腑的意象、絢麗的色彩和文化的象徵符號當中可見一二。
古拿溫曾經身陷牢獄13年，在此期間他創造了這幅《魚市》。盧卡斯·馬吉丹醫生是古拿溫的早期支持者，積極贊助其創作，並曾經收藏本幅作品。在這裡，人們只能驚嘆古拿溫的創作才華，因為他僅依靠記憶和想像來重現爪哇人的日常光景。他長期被監禁，卻因為這番經歷而展開深省的新階段，重新創造其藝術風格，邁向更成熟的階段。《魚市》體現了古拿溫的經典風格，畫面色調鮮豔明亮，色彩之間有時互不協調，而且人物的身軀被誇張地拉長、四肢扭曲。
「我只是個鄉村男孩，在美好的自然環境和農耕生活中長大。這片土地的景觀令人驚嘆，起伏的青綠山麓上盡是稻田，這些都在繪畫之美中結晶：農家生活的美好。」
亨德拉·古拿溫《蛇舞者》1977年作，油畫畫布，196 x 136公分。2011年4月4日香港蘇富比，成交價16,340,000 港幣。來源：盧卡斯·馬吉丹醫生
作品以蜿蜒的筆觸和色彩的熱烈碰撞，精心策劃一場令人目眩的協同舞蹈，引領觀者神遊其中。畫面刻劃一位魚販、魚販的兒女和熱情的顧客，背景是壯麗的海岸線，岩石、灌木和隨海風搖曳的植物散落其中。如此宏偉和複雜的作品，鮮見於藝術市場，本品畫面一望無際，為古拿溫的八個創作主題提供完美背景。在本作中，他還採用了標誌性的 Z 形構圖，引領觀者的目光在畫布上來回漫遊，細賞那微亮的蔚藍天空，還有在前景中嬉戲的兩個孩子。賣魚者把叉伸進桶裡抓魚，而一位婦人則敏捷地彎腰查看當天的漁獲。
古拿溫深情地眷戀著屬於爪哇人民的遼闊山脈和蜿蜒線條，以生動的姿態和表情為之注入活力。畫中女子身上的可巴雅有絢麗的蠟染圖案和象徵圖案，半透明的可巴雅隨著女子的動作在海風中飄動，似乎有著催眠的力量，教人如癡如醉。
《魚市》對生活中的儀式、人際的關係以及生命的壯麗致敬，無疑是罕見於拍賣場的古拿溫傑作，極具份量。藝術家以人性化的角度來描繪印尼，同時卻又令它顯得偉大，並以澎湃的動力與精緻的色彩處理作為烘托。這是古拿溫長久以來的情感所歸，從其本人的說話當中可見：「我只是個鄉村男孩，在美好的自然環境和農耕生活中長大。這片土地的景觀令人驚嘆，起伏的青綠山麓上盡是稻田，這些都在繪畫之美中結晶：農家生活的美好。」