Ay Tjoe Christine

 

Private Collection, Germany

Jakarta, German Embassy, At the Day of German Unity, 2002

The painting is in good condition overall. The canvas is clear and sound. Under ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of retouching. Framed.
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Structure has been and still remains an essential part of Ay Tjoe Christine’s works. On one level, Ay Tjoe embraces and revels in structure but on another, its rigidity repels her. She finds liberation in making art and thus it becomes an alternate universe in which she is the architect and the creator of all the rules. It is this independent and non-conforming spirit that prompted her to replicate the intensity of ink or graphite on paper on canvas as an attempt to magnify these effects and to overcome the limitations of paper.

Bangunan Sehari II (One Day Edifice II) is one of the strongest and finest works of Ay Tjoe Christine’s early oeuvre. Blurring the lines between drawing, etching and paintings, it oscillates between realism and abstraction. Tension between opposing elements that are usually found in graphic training - black versus light, space versus spatial construct – is harnessed perfectly in the aesthetics of the present work and thus creates the ideal balance between weight and weightlessness, transience and permanence, seen and unseen. As fragile tendrils connect one structure to the next, the visual concept relates the present work to Ay Tjoe’s more recent Layer series (2010 onwards), which has become one of her strongest corpus. This correlation between the two expresses a thought and creative process that was important enough for the artist to incessantly develop and attempt to perfect for more than a decade. As a missing link and by its own merits, Bangunan Sehari II is one of the most important pieces from Ay Tjoe Christine’s earlier years.