OK here we go, a bit late. The best gallery opening of the winter holiday high season in Bali was just before Christmas at Biasa Artspace. Indieguerillas were the artists, a husband and wife team out of Central Java, who hail from the worlds of interior and graphic design and … Continue reading
Has Chicago’s Minasian Oriental Rug Gallery gone flat? In a certain sense, yes – – they’ve hung a fabulous show of Indonesian flatweave textiles rather than their usual rugs. The exhibition, entitled “Island Magic: Court and Tribal Textiles from Indonesia” runs through the 10th of January, and was reviewed in HALI this … Continue reading
Better late than never, here’s a review of the October group show by SF|Tribal, an association of Bay Area dealers. This year the event, entitled Primal at the Presidio, had a superb venue (Herbst Pavilion), for the weekend show and opening party. Numerous prominent dealers in fine Indonesian textiles and … Continue reading
Who hung this show? I forgot to ask during the opening last Saturday at Komaneka Gallery. What was extraordinary to me, and what begged the question about who hung this show, was the spontaneous emergence of a narrative, revealed in the sequence of images considered in turn while circulating clockwise … Continue reading
Something profound happened at the opening reception for Davina Stephens’ exhibition entitled “This Side of Paradise” (Ganesha Gallery, Four Seasons Resort Jimbaran, 18 December). What happened is perhaps best voiced by considering the contrasts in Davina’s most recent work. On the one hand these are images that could be, and have … Continue reading
I have always been a big fan of small containers. They imply the concealment and protection of something precious, something treasured – – or treacherous. The tribal cultures of Southeast Asia have produced some of the most beautiful and enigmatic small containers ever. Apparently I’m not the only one who … Continue reading
Finally, here are photos from the Ugo Untoro/Filippo Sciascia vernissage at Biasa Artspace (which I posted about a couple weeks ago). Your patience has been rewarded. Sorry, no photos of Ugo. He’s kind of shy. The tense reciprocity of Ugo and Filippo’s collaborative works is visually arresting, and crackles with static electricity. Viewers were … Continue reading
Here is another special summer exhibition on at the Met that’s a crowd-pleaser, a kid-pleaser, and also pleasing to serious connoisseurs. Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru, which stays up until 1 September. Many of these seventy-or-so masterpieces of featherwork are a millenium and a half old. … Continue reading
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has outdone itself this year with a schedule of summer exhibitions to amaze its seasonal sea of visitors and keep the revolving doors turning at 78rpm until “back to school” time comes around. We don’t usually go Baroque here, but must make note of Art … Continue reading
Lush, crisp, sophisticated, graphic, earthy, arresting. Antique batik at its highest levels has much to offer contemporary textile designers. Far more than one would think based on the banal repertoire of tourist batiks which are the most frequently seen examples outside of Indonesia. Visit the Honolulu Academy of Art between … Continue reading
Davina Stephens‘ paintings are a lush celebration of the fecundity of Bali. She expresses not only the fecundity of this tropical world in all its riotous exuberance, she reveals the fecundity that arises at the intersection of Bali with the rest of the world which beholds, adores and consumes it. … Continue reading
From last December until March an extraordinary exhibition of Indonesian textiles was up at the venerable Art Institute of Chicago, entitled The Art of Indonesian Textiles. It closed in March, so if you didn’t go, you missed it. But you can still get the book, which is as extraordinary as … Continue reading