Nurkholis
At right Nurkholis is standing with a painting in front of his studio.
Born in 1969 in Jepara - a town which is very popular in arts, especially in furniture and woodcarving. So he has been involved in the arts since his childhood. This became natural consequence when he continued his study at Fine Art Faculty of ISI Yogyakarta. Some prestigious art awards had ever been given to him along his study. Due to his achievement he even accepted an award from the Indonesian Minister of Education and Culture in 1992. Also, he was best graduate from ISI with Cumlaude in 1994.
He chose to live in Yogyakarta and decided to become just an artist, working totally on art. It was showing that he has a strong thoroughness in art world, and this has been proven by his productivity and numerous exhibitions he did.
Along his career, he has two periods of his painting. The first period, many art critic said as the period of rock and sky formation. It was period of his absurdity and metaphysical ideas even a strange world he created as his personal expression.
Angus Dermawan T, an Indonesian art critic, said that the rock in Nurkholis's painting was a setting property for drama of his idea, obsession, imagination and his metaphysical experience as a Javanese man who had been surrounded by symbolic culture and absurdity earlier. Some of his exhibitions reveals many improvements in his work. Many times he places two or more ideas, contradictory visual elements combined by his special technique which was formed by some artistic effect to compose unity. Concerning this, writer Suwarno W stated that what happened to Nurkholis was his wildness in thinking and imagination as his creative power. That's why some people may find one or more style and ideas he expresses in his canvasses as a strange composition. Exactly, his freely work and negligence to any art isms resulting his art mysterious, surprise and unusual, as well as could be seen in his third solo painting exhibition on September 1999.
By the way, this exhibition is the mark of his second period of his art work. He used his body and himself as the way to paint. It was not just as a brush function, but he used the body as the way to transform his idea and emotion on canvas directly. By the printing technique, he transform his body on canvas totally. Of course, the result was his body reproduction, which was built from "his coitus" with canvas. Anyway, every result of printing were different, depended on body movement, position, rhythm and energy that used for. His continuity in the experiments always makes him exploring creativity and unlimited world.
Writer Nanang Arizona commented his last exhibition as the period of the process of body transcendency, Nanang added, there was a meditative and silent atmosphere which was build by Nurkholis.
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