Nirmala Dutt Shanmughalingam (1941 - 2016)

Woman Series

Footnotes

Provenance
From the estate of the artist

Nirmala Dutt Shanmughalingam
女性系列
1999-2001年作

簽名：NIRMALA 2001（右下）"WOMAN" SERIES 1999 Nirmala Dutt Shanmugalingam（畫背）
丙烯畫布

來源
藝術家家族收藏

Lauded as one of the most important contemporary female artists in Malaysia and the region, Nirmala Dutt Shanmughalingam began her artistic career in the early 1960s. Trained in Malaysia, the United States and the UK, Dutt introduced unconventional techniques and methods to her practice. Often combining, photos, photomontage, abstract paintings, drawings and prints to her works, her works project unique images. Ahead of her time, Dutt was concerned with social issues and addressed difficult subjects such as political injustices, global conflicts, crisis, women's rights, and environmental pollution. Utilizing her photography skill, Dutt documented ordinary people's stories, in particular stories by marginalised people who had suffered under extreme atrocities. Her continuous quest to trigger viewers' conscience to political and societal transgressions earned her fame as a prominent photo documentary artist and social commentator.

Woman Series, one of the works that belongs in Dutt's Self Portrait collection, is a rare piece of abstract painting where the artist poured out her intense feelings about herself and her subjects. Passionate and poetic, Woman Series shows a touch of femininity in the midst of intensity, highlighted by the combination of strong and evenly painted dark red base and the branching out of free forms in gentler red. Flower patterns with splashes of orange, yellow, pink and lavender are highlighted in darker colours, lending a dreamlike quality to the painting. Yet, on the same space, energetic sprays of angry red dots resembling blood appear on the top left-hand corner. They represent the voices of people whose cries were heard and chronicled by Dutt. Highly valued and personal, Woman Series was created to affirm the artist's full awareness as she searched for her own presence in this world, as well as the causes of her empathy towards victims of circumstances, whose lives interweaved with hers through her narratives.