Returning to KL after his successful VWFA Project Room exhibition Neo-Chiaroscuro in 2009 VWFA KL is pleased to present Verisimilitude the first major solo exhibition in Malaysia by Indonesian artist Yogie Ginanjar. The title of the exhibition uses the term ‘verisimilitude’ or versions of the truth as found in literature and the visual arts. It is this notion of recreation that resonates within the artist’s practice as he attempts to highlight its artificiality and the hierarchy of images within the practice of pop culture and contemporary art.

Developing his ongoing interrogation of iconic works from Western Old Master painting and the critical collaging of ephemeral photographic images from the Internet, Ginanjar looks at processes of reproduction and ideologies of identity. Throughout the show audiences will recognise images from the canon of Art History as they attempt to decipher his hybrid iconographies. By destabilising and parodying the familiar he questions the status of painting as well as the complex relationship between East, West and global sensibilities.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Otaku develops the Ginanjar’s fusing and questioning of visual influences where the artist paints his friend and local artist in multiple versions as the characters in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp. However the object of interest is not a human cadaver as in the original but a Japanese anime doll as part of the fanatical Otaku culture that idolises fictional comic and animated characters. This humorous objectification fuses the dramatic strategies of lighting and composition taken from historical painting with contemporary pop culture and irony.

The Big Catch with the Fall of Icarus continues his fascination with the mythical Greek story of the boy who tried to escape imprisonment by flying away from captivity using wings made of wax and feathers, but who, in his excitement flew too close to the sun, melting his wings causing him to tragically plummet to the earth. As in previous works on this subject, the artist inserts the moment of the fall into paintings of sampled Internet images of Caucasian subjects on holiday. This objectification of his subject, stripped of all individuality, puts Ginanjar in a position of power as he creates a farcical statement about decadence, artificiality and personal questions about Western dominance that slowly corrupts and absorbs local contexts.