Heri Dono : Madman Butterfly

14 Oct-24 Nov 2011

Overview

Heri Dono is perhaps best known through his installations which are heavily influenced by, and the result of experimenting with, the most popular Javanese folk theatre: wayang. Wayang performances combine a number of artistic and extra-artistic elements - visual arts, singing, music, story telling, along with a mythological story-based philosophy of life, social criticisms, and humour. References to waywang are also integral to his paintings: from out of wild deformations and free fantasies emerge characters from the traditional wayang stories which are mixed together with his profound knowledge of children’s cartoons, animation films and comics. The resulting canvases are populated by astonishing characters and strange juxtapositions, the fantastic and absurd joined by the everyday to create new and vibrant stories in which the artist will insert his own critical remarks on socio-political issues both in Indonesia and abroad.