An Indonesian artist who splits his time between his homeland and Rhode Island, Entang Wiharso explores social, cultural and political issues in a variety of mediums. Since 1995, Wiharso has exhibited his work internationally, which has cropped up with greater frequency in the last several years at such prestigious events as the 2013 Venice Biennale. For his first solo show in New York, Wiharso presents a solid selection of figurative paintings, sculptures and metal reliefs, all blurring boundaries between expressionism, surrealism and traditional storytelling.
One large painting from 2014, Double Protection: Invisible Threat, depicts a man and woman coupling at the center of a nightmarish whirl of levitating bodies, severed heads and machinery with tubes snaking out of them, suggesting some sort of medical equipment. His massive 2013 aluminum relief, My Heart Is Bigger than You Think, connects contorted figures, weapons and word balloons (with texts like your brain is very delicious) into a modern-day version of Hieronymus Bosch’s hellish 16th-century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights.
While these works recall the oppression that Wiharso’s family suffered while the artist was growing up in Jakarta during the regime of former Indonesian strongman Suharto, his life-size sculpture from 2014, Inheritance, offers a different vision. A family portrait, it shows Wiharso with his American wife and child around a table, which is surmounted by a gigantic carp. Magical but threatening, it’s a fish out of water—a metaphor, perhaps, for his ambiguous feelings about his life in the United States, and a past he can’t leave behind.—Paul Laster