작품 상세

This is obviously no Breakfast at Tiffany’s, after the Audrey Hepburn-George Peppard film, but still one of some import, reflecting and mirroring on life’s vicissitudes, apart from relationships forged. The place was where Khalil Ibrahim and wife and sometimes an American professor then attached to Universiti Malaya met to have breakfast, at a cafeteria in an apartment where the university billeted its overseas employees. Khalil had relocated a few years back to Kuala Lumpur (September 1966) from his eventful studies in London. Memories, happy and sad, flooded back, partitioned into two contrasting scenes, one three-quarter space in bright red (orange)-and-yellow conflagration, and the right quarter placid in geometric lozenges. This must be one of the rare Khalil’s symbolic works. Khalil Ibrahim’s innate flair of anatomy clinched him 2nd Prize in Lever Brothers’s Malayan Life national art competition in 1959, that indirectly won him a Pahang State scholarship to study at the St Martin’s School of Art and Design (National Diploma in Design, 1964; and post-graduate, 1965). And since returning in September 1966, he had become a full time artist painting in batik, watercolours, acrylic, oil, pastels, pen (ink), and he had even dabbled in etchings. In 1970, he had the first double solo at Samat Art Gallery and then was invited for a solo in Indonesia. He had a retrospective of sorts celebrating 50 years of painting in A Continued Dialogue exhibition at Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur, in 2004. Khalil was also actively involved in the Malaysian Watercolour Society (MWS) and was its founder member. An outstanding southpaw, he joined the MWS painting expeditions to Sweden (Simrikshawn to Uppsala) and India (New Delhi to Nainital / Jeolikot).