Anuar Rashid's Profile

With one of his art.

From the early beginning of his career, Anuar Rashid has been a maverick. At a tender age of 20 years old, through his "Birth of Inderaputera" (1978) #31, Syed Ahmad Jamal, then the director of National Art Gallery, declared him as "the new sensation of the Malaysian Art scene, perhaps its brightest star yet". A radical and an independent, Anuar joined Anak Alam colony in 1978 after graduating from Uitm because he was persuaded by its communal spirit and comradeship. After a succesful solo exhibition "Wind, Water & Fire (1983) in Kuala Lumpur, he left for Europe on several grants and fellowships. He also made unofficial visits to the then communist Romania and Yugoslavia, and briefly stayed in the communist-dominated northern Italy. On his return to Malaysia in 1986, he completed a mural for Central Market titled "farewell" , and then retreated reclusively to his home state Kedah. There, he spent most of his time in mosques and suraus, designing and constructing 'mehrab' and 'nuqarnas'. Twenty years has passed before he eventually returned to Central Market for the Tiga Alam Exhibition. 

For Anuar, art is nothing less than an adventure. It is the only adventure because it is total, involving the body, mind, senses, and mood. What makes his works extraordinary are the intoxicating dynamics of movement that resonate with limitless energy, generating a field of forces that approach infinity. They at once compose and decompose, being simultaneously negentropic and entropic. Through his works, Anuar stripped matter of its illusory stillness, revealing the storm of motion within it. 

Anuar avoids philosophizing art. He intentionally cultivated a passion for all things 'not art' ; exploring physics and logic. He sees no separation between his life and his work. Born into a religious environment, Anuar journeyed as a young adult into atheism and extreme left ideologies to refute notions of perceived 'truth' , only to re-discover the pervasiveness of the existence of the 'Absolute'.

Anuar is descendental; the former evokes higher consciousness and the latter the unconscious. But for all their difference, 'formal' Mustapha, and 'informal' Anuar, their paintings have something in common: not only their evocation of the 'infinite', but the intention to restore the sense of enigma and singularity of existence last in everyday life. 

By : Nani Kahar, Currator, labDNA.