Teja Astawa (1971) is a Balinese Artist who lives and works in Sanur, Bali. Teja graduated from the Indonesian College of Fine Arts (STSI) in Denpasar in 1990. Astawa works in thematic series that draw his inspiration from subjects that range from the animals figure, to the wayang stories that nurtured his childhood. His style is characteristically naive with a palette of vivid colours, a childlike manner of rendering figures in flat and simplified stylization, and a delightfully mischievous imagination.
Drawing from episodes, morality tales and characters from Hindu epics and Balinese equivalent of Aesop fables, Astawa brings to these stories that are the staple of Balinese art and image making his personalized interpretations replete with comic touches. Contemporary popular idioms weave through Astawa wayang paintings. Even so, in Astawa treatment of wayang characters there remains a faithfulness to basic wayang iconography that enables identification of the characters. Naivety as a stylistic device in the history of Balinese art is first associated with the Young Artists Style which emerged in the late 1960s in the Penestanan area near Ubud. Astawa naivety is to be distinguished from the latter. Among young contemporary Balinese artists, there are not a few who have developed a kind of naive treatment. Astawa comic oeuvre is by distinction more childlike and innocent, seemingly to enjoy an internal curiosity and humour about the mundane things immediately surrounding him.
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