signed and dated on the reverse
oil on canvas
53 x 64 cm, 76 x 88 cm (framed)
Provenance
Gift from the artist to the previous owner
Acquired by the present owner from the previous owner
Lot Location: Jakarta, Indonesia
On display at Art Agenda Jakarta.
Buy Now for US$ 10,000
The Poetics of Gesture: Srihadi Soedarsono & Affandi
Both Srihadi Soedarsono and Affandi occupy seminal positions in the narrative of modern Indonesian painting, yet their approaches to the human figure reveal markedly different sensibilities. In Dancer with Fan, Srihadi presents the figure in a moment of quiet introspection. The profile composition, downward gaze, and delicate grip of the fan suggest inwardness rather than performance. The surface is built through thick, tactile applications of paint, allowing the figure to emerge gradually from a veil of texture. Form is softened, almost dissolved, creating a presence that is felt rather than declared.
Affandi’s Balinese Dancer, by contrast, embodies outward energy and movement. The figure confronts the viewer with a directness and vitality that is unmistakable. His gestural handling of paint, squeezed, swirled, and layered, translates the dancer’s motion into the very substance of the canvas. Colour is vivid, brushwork fluid and rhythmic, and the body is not contained but propelled by an inner force. Where Srihadi evokes stillness, Affandi exudes dynamism.
Placed in dialogue, these works open onto two distinct yet interconnected ways of imagining dance and femininity within Indonesian modernism. Rather than opposing one another, they expand the possibilities of how the female figure can be felt through paint. In one, the presence gathers slowly, shaped by restraint and a sensitivity to surface, where dance becomes a moment held in suspension. In the other, it unfolds through momentum, carried by gesture and chromatic force, where movement seems to extend beyond the canvas itself. What emerges is not a contrast of subjects, but a widening of pictorial language, where femininity is articulated through both stillness and motion, reflection and immediacy, held in a dynamic and productive tension.
