Entang Wiharso Fluidly Expresses Complex, Glittery Narratives Across Painting And Sculpture, Flexing Boundaries Of Imagination And Nature

Humor and horror collide in a glittery re-imagining of Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic, as we gaze into the blue eyes of a pursed-lipped couple standing in front of a burning house on a dreamy landscape. Flames emanating from the roof juxtapose the lavish multi-faceted blue sky and lush verdant tree.

Entang Wiharso’s American Gothic with Broken Pitchfork (2022) draws us in with awe and amusement and retains our attention as we navigate the details of textures and brushstrokes evoking magical realism. It’s among the captivating works on multi-story view until May 28 as Entang Wiharso: When Rabbits Eat Meat, the artist’s third solo show at Marc Straus Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side. The poignant works, created during and in response to the pandemic and tempestuous sociocultural and sociopolitical events, investigate themes of migration, historical narratives, identity, and belonging.

Wiharso, born 1967 in Tegal, Central Java, Indonesia, is now based in Rhode Island where he maintains a multi-disciplinary practice, fluidly creating across painting, sculpture, video, installations, and performance. Wiharso’s visual narratives entice and provoke, straddling imagery from contemporary life to Javanese animism.

We encounter more glitter, along with beads, augmenting Wiharso’s fantastical and absurd When Rabbits Eat Meat (2023), challenging our perception of reality and inviting a wide range of emotions. Wiharso began using glitter out of a fascination with unfixed images, and to playfully camouflage menacing ideas and entities within the clever composition. It underscores his agility as a printer, confident enough in his skill to incorporate crafts elements. Humans have always been mesmerized by reflective surfaces, and Neanderthals used sparkly crushed minerals, such as calcite crystals or mica, to embellish cave paintings.

Cartoonish creatures, evoking mythology and futuristic humanlike heads with elongated necks, oscillate between ostentatious and ominous, mingling in a vibrant garden of delight and deception. The ancient Javanese believed that all living things, including plants, have a soul, and we feel the myriad life forms emanating from Wiharso’s intricate paintings. Indonesian people comprise hundreds of ethnic groups, each with their own myths and legends to explain the origin of people and ancestral interactions with demons and deities, a complex duality that plays out in Wiharso’s oeuvre. The title subverts nature, as rabbits are generally herbivores (though snowshoe hares eat meat), while confronting dark reality, as cannibalism may result among rabbits deprived of nutrition, especially water. Rabbits are sacred in many cultures, and contemporary Indonesia is home to the world’s rarest, the Sumatran striped rabbit.

An avid gardener, Wiharso conducted research in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, where he became aware of the relationships between nature and man-made structures, as well as the history of slavery in the United States and the ongoing legacy of racism. He began incorporating trees in his work after a tour guide in Charleston, South Carolina, revealed a tree that had been used for lynching, subverting the racist history through his animist-infused imagery.

We transition from large-scale paintings to monumental wall-mounted sculptures with Nowhere to Go (2016), composed of aluminum, car paint, resin, color pigment, thread, and polyurethane coating. An array of figures in, on, and around a vintage Volkswagen bus with exaggerated features such as elongated squiggly arms and pipes that connect the scattered scene. Social commentary abounds as our gaze journeys across this elaborate depiction, conjuring cultural references from superhero capes to post-apocalyptic masks and tubes to the hippy ethos of the VW bus. Figures are trapped and entangled in the composition, with “nowhere to go,” yet the barrage of references fuels our visual exploration.

Eyes play a key role in our interactions with Wiharso’s works, from the blues of the American Gothic farmer couple to the browns of the VW bus crew and the browns of After the Agreement Borderless #2 (2013). The consistency of the latter is most obvious within the brass wall sculpture, where the realistic brown eyes amplify the bizarre placements (one figure with three eyes and another with two on one side of their face). Wiharso borrows from the aesthetic of Balinese brass statues of Hindu gods and Buddhas to present a contemporary dialogue. The title reminds us of Wiharso’s borderless identity as a globally-recognized artist and the ongoing worldwide Imperialism and systems of power and control that oppress and marginalize people living within contested borderlands.

“The eyes like to see, and they are also receiving, so it helps to initiate the conversation between the viewer and the work,” Wiharso told me on opening night. “I grew up seeing one color, brown eyes or darker eyes, and now (in the U.S.), I notice all these colors. There are so many blues and greens and grays, like my wife’s eyes. I also like playing with the eyes looking so real and also so fake.”