Lot 082
Abdul Latiff Mohidin
b. Negeri Sembilan, 1941
Rimba, c. 1990s
signed on verso
oil on canvas
91 x 91cm
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Kuala Lumpur
ESTIMATE RM 180,000 – 340,000
PRICE REALISED RM 201,600.00
|
The imperative of ecological balance lies at the heart of human survival. Man’s greed in decimating forest cover for haphazard development and lucre adds to the calamity of climate change. Although forest makes up some 67.6% of Malaysia’s land mass (World Bank report 2016), massive deforestation goes on in Sabah and Sarawak. Nature should be left on its own in its cycle of renewal and decay, and to heal itself. Failure to observe sustainable development and safeguarding the environment only results in catastrophic fires like the ones engulfing Australia and parts of the United States this year. Latiff Mohidin’s Rimba after the wild splurges of Gelombang is an oasis of soul-searching and re-romancing the land and water resources. Latiff’s Rimba is not the logical luxuriant green, but often couched in chromatic textures and sienna streaks in dry desiccated strokes, and here, with brackish brownish black stumps and unusual conflagration of orangey red. Ruminative with ponderous irregular shapes and lines, Rimba, deriving from the Rawa-Rawa (Marshlands), reveals an entity that’s alive and powerful but by appearance moribund. Amidst the sturdy sentinels of trees and the surrounding foliages, the forest hosts big and tiny organisms, visible or concealed at different altitudes and in different climes. Therapeutic and destructive at the same time, it can unleash irreversible damage if humans block the river course with hydroelectric dams and strip the land bare and loose of all its vegetation. Mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, fishes and some micro-organisms are interdependent on Nature for survival. Tengku Sabri Ibrahim, the curator of Latiff’s Retrospective, observed that Rimba marked a total control of his Gestural Period (1980s to 2000), with broad, quick strokes, and poetic compositions while patching up the colours.
A national treasure in paint, print (printmaking), bronze (sculpture) and letters (poet, essayist and translator in three languages: Malay, English and German), Latiff Mohidin hit a career peak in art when his celebrated Pago-Pago Series (1960-1969) headlined a three-month exhibition at the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris in early 2018. He was awarded a major Retrospective by the National Art Gallery in December 2012 to June 2013, his second. He studied at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in West Berlin. He got the John D. Rockefeller III Fellowship to study at Pratt Institute (1965) and the French scholarship to study printmaking at the Atelier Lacouriere-Frelaut in Paris (1969). Locally, he won 2nd Prize (Graphics) in the 1968 Salon Malaysia. In literature, his awards included the SEA Write Award (1984 and 1986) and the Malaysian Literary Awards from 1972 to 1976. |