Bandung Artist Collection

About this collection

This collection contains two hundred and sixty artworks from two modern Indonesian artists, Ahmad Sadali (1924-1987, Garut, Indonesia) and Haryadi Suadi (1938-2016). The physical artworks are part of private collections, and in 2018, Anissa Rahadi, doctoral candidate in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, worked with the artists' families to photograph the works that are now in this digital collection.

The artworks included by Ahmad Sadali are photographic reproductions made for a retrospective exhibition at Galeri Nasional Indonesia in 2014. The collection is comprised of oil on canvas paintings and works on papers from the 1950s until Sadali's final year in 1987. The artworks included by Haryadi Suadi were produced from the 1960s to 2014 and consists of oil paintings, glass paintings, and prints.

Historical context

Ahmad Sadali is often regarded as the "Father of abstract art" in Indonesia. This collection records Sadali's early engagement with formalist abstraction, his shift to painterly abstraction informed by the works of Mark Rothko and Antoni Tàpies , and his incorporation of Arabic/Quranic calligraphy. His experiment with Arabic/Quranic calligraphy began subtly in his works in the late 1960s as a personal and spiritual marking served to instill contemplation to God. For this reason, he is also known as one of the pioneering figures in the development of calligraphic modernism in Indonesia. In many of his paintings, Sadali gave substantial attention to texture as an expression of beauty and a manifestation of Sadali's religiosity. Sadali produced a rich textural quality in his paintings using marble paste, gold leaves, and oil paints. Sadali's works from the 1970s and 80s show a shift in colors as he changed from brighter colors to more subdued and earthy tones of ochre, gold, and darker shades of green and blue. Sadali stated that the earthy colors were more suited to his artistic expression, highlighting restraint, balance, and modesty.

Prints dominate Haryadi's works as he was trained as a printmaker in the newly opened printmaking studio at the art school in Bandung and mainly worked with woodcuts. Many of his works from the mid-1960s onward display Haryadi's dialogue with the works of Japanese printmaker Shikō Munakata (1903-1975, Aomori, Japan), whose crude carved lines and unpolished forms informed Haryadi's artistic sensibility. Haryadi also looked at how Munakata positioned himself as a modern Japanese artist through his rejection of Western modernism and exploration of Japanese "real" in the form of hanga or woodblock print. In the early 1970s, Haryadi marked his return to local artistic practice by exploring Cirebonese glass paintings that began with a series of destined encounters with prominent glass painter, Rastika (1942-2014 Cirebon, West Java, Indonesia). From Rastika, Haryadi learned Cirebonese glass painting techniques, patterns, and subject matters, some of which are derived from the Sufi visual tradition developed in Cirebon that are replete with Sufi doctrinal teachings. Haryadi's glass paintings show the recontextualizations of Cirebonese motifs and patterns as they inhabit Haryadi's world of composite images. These patterns were reworked to represent a new set of ideas using new languages and methods of representation.

Using the collection

For questions about this collection, please contact Kroch Asia Library reference staff at asiaref@cornell.edu.

Sets

Ahmad Sadali

Haryadi Suadi

More information

Collection steward

Jeffrey Petersen, Southeast Asia Librarian

Metadata creation

Anissa Rahadi, Ph.D. 2021

Funding

Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences, awarded to Anissa Rahadi in 2019.

Credits

This collection overview was adapated from an introduction to the collection originally written by Anissa Rahadi, Ph.D. 2021.

Collection sources