Image size: 18 x 27 cm
Latiff Mohidin, born in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia in 1941 completed his primary education in Singapore. While in Singapore, at an early age, Latiff’s precocity in understanding paintings earned him the nickname, ‘Wonder Boy’. From 1960-1964, Latiff studied art at Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Berlin, Germany and did brief residencies in Paris and New York. Inspired by his exploration of Southeast Asia in 1964, Latiff has since produced compelling series of artworks – the result of a synthesis between his European experience and the rediscovery of his homeland. He is also a poet who has published several volumes of poetry. Latiff started to use landscape as a subject and composition in the 1950s. The Landscape series can be seen as his tendency of translating studies of nature towards abstraction. This includes analytical studies of plant life, mountains and beaches from his previous oeuvres. ‘Landscape (3)’ is a sketch ‘erased’ with bold brushstrokes attempting to enshroud the visibility of the initial landscape. It could signify Latiff’s way of ‘unlearning’ the conventions of landscape drawing: by erasing the ‘old’ to make way for the ‘new’.
