Description
Description
Fendry Ekel Entries is a comprehensive monograph with contributions by several international art historians, looking into the painter’s recent work on canvas from 2011 to 2015. The first chapter, ‘Chess Problems: On the Paintings of Fendry Ekel’, is an introduction by the prize-winning Belgian author Christophe Van Gerrewey. It addresses Ekel’s aesthetic thinking as well as the artistic strategies he applies when dealing with images. For the second chapter, ten art historians – one curator and one artist, all colleagues of the book’s editor Astrid Honold – have been matched with a particular painting from Ekel’s oeuvre and invited to write about it, departing from Van Gerrewey’s observations. This adaptation of the ‘catalogue entry’, a concise commissioned text on one specific artwork, allows for an in-depth study of Ekel’s practice, based on phenomenological facts and bringing together multiple individual perspectives as well as theoretical approaches.The concept of this book, which departs from artistic practice in establishing a close relationship between image and text, is reflected in its intelligent and refined layout by Studio Laucke Siebein, Amsterdam/Berlin – Black Cat Publishing’s sole partner for graphic design matters since the publisher was founded in 2005.
Fendry Ekel (1971, Jakarta, Indonesia) studied fine art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the esteemed Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. As an outcome of his solo exhibition at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA) in New York in 2010, he was invited to participate in the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York in 2011. Ekel has been dubbed a pictor doctus, who critically investigates the power of art, figuration and representation by appropriating iconic images from our collective memory. His multilayered monumental paintings after existing photographs explore the relations between man and memory. Fendry Ekel has exhibited his work internationally and had recurring solo shows in Amsterdam, Jakarta, Milan, Valencia, Mexico City and New York. Ekel lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Berlin, Germany.
co-publication with Black Cat Publishing