Ushering the 2019 calendar, Galeri Prima kick-start its exhibition with a simple, ingenuous and unsophisticated yet lively display, INGENIOUS SOUL, a naive art style exhibition.
Ten young emerging and senior artists – a mixture of self-taught ones, including an autism teenager and fine art background artists participating in INGENIOUS SOUL and they are Ali Akbar Othman; Elly Nor Suria; Ismail Baba; Khairulsani Ismail; Yeanni Koo; Nancy Lua Ching Sing; Lyna Khairi; Artjamila; Widodo Soerono and Zurin Shaari.
Ingenious means (of a person) clever, original, creative and inventive, whereas soul means the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal and emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance.
A total of 92 artworks exhibited and the display artworks can be divided into few genres; Outsider Art, Primitive Art, Folk Art, Naive Art and Marginal Art that were still under the category of Native art style.
Naive art is simple, unaffected and unsophisticated and is usually refers to art made by artists who have had no formal training in an art school or academy and characterised by childlike simplicity of execution and vision. They are often categorized as non-academic or self-taught. Nevertheless, they did produce artworks of distinctive values.
In Malaysia, it is only in recent years that works made by non-professionally trained, self-taught artists have begun to be shown publicly, usually under the naive label. Since we are moving forward towards contemporary, naive art is not the same anymore, as the artist starts to assimilate and stylize their works to keep the pace with the current and contemporary art scene, which we can see in Yeanni Koo artworks that have unique composition but still defining the style of naive. Same goes to Elly Nor Suria and Khairulsani Ismail who play with colours and manipulating their subjects into their own.
Presented during the exhibition opening reception is Datin Nonadiah Abdullah, Independent Non-Executive Director of Tomei Consildated Berhad who also officiated the exhibition with simple yet meaningful speech.
Learn more about the exhibition: E-Catalogue
