Nobody Exists In A Still Life by Minstrel Kuik
Haridas Contemporary is excited to announce Malaysian artist Minstrel Kuik (b. 1976) first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Kuik presents a new body of work comprising of eight paintings and four fabric-based installations, which develop almost three decades of an artistic career spanning photography, painting, drawing, and installation. As extended meditations on process and methodology, these works highlight Kuik’s deep examination of the artistic process, something tantamount to a phenomenology of artmaking.
The paintings of still-life arrangements incorporate elements of previous photographic works and studies, to which Kuik further incorporates found objects from the artist’s studio. Illusionistic in effect, the paintings are the result of Kuik’s attempts to observe, internalise, translate, and manifest the visible world through her own interior landscapes. For Kuik, these are exercises in perception and sensorial coordination; they activate the play of subjectivities and perceptions that the artist organises, consciously and unconsciously, in the moment of artmaking.
These investigations of what might be called the Gestalt in the workings of the artistic consciousness also inform the series of fabric installations presented here. Suspended from horizontal rods, the installations expand on Kuik’s broad approaches to painting and sculpture, turning ready-to-wear garments and other textile scraps into assemblages that transpose and translate materiality into figuration, and figuration into political, gendered, corporeal subjects. The recurrent motif of the leopard stalks these works with its associations of rebellion, desire, and instinct; for Kuik, these are aspects of a collective unconscious that drive artistic decisions and form the basis of artmaking as a risk-taking enterprise.
