Image size: 17 x 18 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. ‘New York’ can be seen as an abstract of ‘Composition, New York’, and ‘Komposisi, New York’, both of which comprise multiple stacked and overlapped keys. It could have resulted from Latiff’s venture of scrutinizing his previous work of architectonic tendency. Here, the image seems like a mobilization of the overlapping keys – a transformation from a static pictorial to a movement representing nature’s energy. ‘New York’ may well be regarded as Latiff’s tendency of translating studies towards abstraction.
