Formerly in the Collection of Mr. Alex Papadimitriou

Private Asian Collection

There is evidence of minor wear and some paint loss to edges of the canvas due to abrasions with the frame, but this does not affect the overall image. Upon very close inspection, there is a fine network of craquelure visible throughout surface of the canvas, stable and consistent with age. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals areas of restorations at edges of the canvas and sporadic spots of restoration scattered across the work. Framed.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A philosophical and thoughtful artist, Srihadi Sudarsono yearned to truly convey the emotions that would overcome him at the behest of a glorious landscape. In this grand oil painting, Srihadi filters the graceful mountains of Irian Jaya through the lens of color theory and abstraction. Considering he hailed from The Bandung School, a breeding ground for visionaries who painted in order to harmonize their personal responses with the natural environment, it is imaginable that Srihadi was concerned with articulating his sensory experience upon beholding this magnificent countryside. Rather than emulating the details of the vista with technical verisimilitude, he captures the sensations he absorbed from the view, ultimately immortalizing his ephemeral perception.

 After graduating from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), arguably the origin of modernist tradition in Indonesia, Srihadi subsequently attained a Masters Degree at the Ohio State University in 1962. Exposed to Post-War art in the USA at the zenith of Abstract Expressionism, Srihadi was mesmerized by the potential of Western modernism and began experimenting with myriad styles. He once stated, “I realized that Cubism was just a method, and I had to develop my own individual method”, a process that would take “a long time.”  From his depictions of ethereal, Javanese dancers to his legendary representations of the ⛄Borobudur, Srihadi is a prolific artist who delved into diverse aesthetic styles and themes throughout his lifetime. Moreover, he is feted as the artist responsible for the emergence of a characteristically Indonesian style of abstraction.

Sotheby’s is proud to exhibit a remarkable early work by one of the most noteworthy living modern artists in Indonesia today. In the present lot, Srihadi reduces the panoramic landscape to its pure, basic forms, echoing geometries that appear in the works by American abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. In his non-representational work Equinox, Hofmann presents variegated rectangles balancing in negative space. Though he acknowledges the flat nature of his canvas, he also permeates the painting with a sense of depth by purposefully overlapping these shapes and utilizing contrasting color tones. Similarly, Srihadi invents an element of perspective by mo🍰dulating and saturating certain hues he may have found most striking in his landscape, eventually confining them in enclosed compartments.

Color as we know it, belongs within a context, inherently attached to the visual description of an entity or form. To Srihadi, however, color was theoretically autonomous and existed in its own right. Hence, he first extracts certain colors from the mountains, pastures, skies, and clouds that are associated to them. Sequentially, he mixes his paints in order to find suitable pigments that could truthfully mimic the tones from the landscape. By meticulously placing these blocks of color against one another, he creates chromatic tensions and harmonies in his composition, ultimately creating the impression of a landscape. In the eminent words of Hofmann, “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Srihadi deemed the minutiae of the image insignificant, emphasizing more on tജhe unity of lines and color planes that manifested the𒐪 overall essence of the picture.

Srihadi may have chosen particular colors from the site that reflected his transitory feelings at the very instance when he was observing them. The earthy tones, chosen to reflect the mood generated by his sensory interaction with the landscape, become a plastic means of establishing intervals in time and space. Akin to Srihadi, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky was notable for relating art to spiritual concepts. Kandinsky believed that once color was detached from the objects and lines that would otherwise limit them, their intrinsic properties were able to materialize. His eminent text Du spirituel dans l'art states that color, when acting alone, could be either warm or cold, clear or obscure, concentric or eccentric. Upon analyzing the present lot, it is evident that Srihadi truly comprehended the complexities of color, concedin💎g to all its immeasurable nuances and phy൲siognomies. 

Srihadi employs a brilliant, Prussian blue along the upper edge of his canvas to create the impression of a sky. He is fully cognizant that as a cold color with a concentric movement, the pigment blue inevitably appears to recede into the background꧅. Contrastingly, warmer tones used at the bottom right of the work, such as the khaki and goldenrod yellows, are fundamentally eccentric. Indeed, those warmer lozenges of color inevitably appear closer to the beholder, who automatically assumes they embody the foreground of the pictorial structure. Between the distant skies and closer pastures are masses of color shaded with refreshing pine greens along the right and deeper olive greens towards the left. Naturally produced by both blues and yellows, these greens exist on a spatial plane between the firmaments and the nearby prairies. It is evident that the viewer does not need delineated forms to comprehend the image, because the isolated color fields suggest spatial dimensions autoඣnomously, ultimately placing the fragments of the picture in context.

Srihadi’s painting falls somewhere in between Hofmann’s purely abstract Equinox and Kandinsky’s more discernable and representative landscape, Murnau am Staffelsee. The sinuous horizon in Srihadi’s work, which possesses an ambiguous vanishing point, is a predominant symbol that suggests the boundless scope of nature and the unity of its elements. It is conceivable that the simple 🎀white line, produced with a single stroke of the brush and sweeping across the heavens above the mystical horizon, suggests the presence of a cloud. Srihadi employs white, the color of intense, utter silence and one that is full of possibility, in order to contest the potentials of the endless skyline. He further exemplifies the potentials of this color by blending the massive sheet of white, below the navy firmament, with the greenery below it in order to indicate the interaction of a translucent cloud and the mountains in the distance. By juxtaposing the misty fog with the more solid, opaque𒈔 color fields below, Srihadi delivers the illusion of texture that manifested from his appropriate precise application of the pigment. As an artist who as a child discovered his own spirituality in the sprawling, Javanese topographies, Srihadi often infuses his works with transcendent, blurry horizon that suggests the divine amalgamation of land and sky.

Srihadi, a believer of Javanese cosmology, strongly relied on his personal laku batin, or inner behavior, when in the process of building his creative opus. The laku batin is a method of assimilating the cipta (creation), rasa (feeling) and karsa (will or intention) in order to express ones own piety. As the grandchild of a dagger maker who habitually watched shadow puppet theatre, Srihadi absorbed the ontologies of Javanese art traditions at an early age. According to Srihadi’s wife, Srihadi believes that it is essential for an artist to be mindful of his “third eye”, the source of his intuition, “because through this artistic mediation, the interpretation of human existence takes on specific meaning.” Reverberating Srihadi&rs♚quo;s beliefs, Kandinsky alleged that an artist’s inner necessity serves as the source of ꩲart, the groundwork of forms and the synergy of colors. In order for a mere form to transcend, acquire a life of its own and ultimately become a work of art, it must interact with the human soul.

As the eye traces the sinuous lines of his landscape, it might imagine the rise and fall of human existence. The parallel strips of color start from the secluded sky, transforming into mists and green terrains as they descend down the flat canvas, depicting layers of contemplation. Rather than blending tones to create measured gradations that could result in a realistic image, Srihadi strictly concerns himself with compositional arrangement, three-dimensional illusion and color relationships. It is evident in his body of work that Srihadi was sensitive to the Javanese cultural values that were embedded in his fledgling mind as a child, causing him to develop as an artist who felt deeply connected to his roots despite his exposure to the Western world. One of the fe༺w living artists in Indonesia whose career traces the history of his modern nation, Srihadi painted this image of Irian Jaya at a time when he was experimenting wi♚th color field painting, and appropriately became admired as an insightful colorist; the apex of his oeuvre.