Fendry Ekel

Artist

Fendry Ekel
Indonesia 1971

Dealer

André Simoens Gallery

Fendry Ekel’s paintings are created layer by layer and appear astonishingly sensitive and fragile in contrary with their often loaded subjects. His painting titled The Witness, depicts a cockatoo, a typical exotic animal often associated with ability of speech and the ambience of the oriental. It is situated in a cage, constructed by motives which are inspired by the modernist motives in the paintings of Piet Mondrian. In this particular work Ekel deals with a contradiction of totally opposite visual references that somehow are tied together in a complex network of meanings that seem to have nothing to do with each other; The heritage of colonialism and modernism. In this painting abstraction and figuration are flattened in layers on the same surface into a subversive image that looks totally innocent at first sight.