작품 상세

A most intriguing early work by Dato’ Sharifah Fatimah Zubir has come back to our shores after a lapse of 46 years! It was from the collection of her German-born tutor Peter Kalkhof (1933-2014), when she was studying in Reading, England, in 1975-1976, and it had been passed over to another collector who is now based in Austria. Kalkhof, who was also an artist known for his abstract, taught officially at Reading University from 1966 to 1999. This work developed post-ITM with an odd combination of tubular organic shapes and ambiguous geometric forms. Unusual in Dato’ Sharifah’s repertoire we know today are the streaky lines seemingly haphazard but contained within certain shapes bordered by a broad green stanchion on the right, and a freehand reddish top bar with a perpendicular drop on the left. Dato’ Sharifah comes from the pioneering batch of fine-art students from the Mara Institute of Technology (ITM, now a university), graduating in 1971. She completed her BFA at Reading University, England (1973-1976), and MFA at Pratt Institute, New York (1976-1978), under the JDR III Fund fellowship. She is dubbed as the First Lady of Malaysian Art. Her career has been consistent and sterling with awards such as the Minor Award in the Malaysian Landscape competition (1972) and the Young Contemporary Artists (BMS, 1981) and culminating in the Major Award in the 1979 Salon Malaysia. She also won 3rd Prize in the Islamic World Painting Biennial in Teheran, Iran, in 2003. For her contributions, she was conferred a Dato’ship by the Sultan of Kedah in 2006. She is also a later member of the Utara Group, formed in 1977. In recent years, her artworks prices have skyrocketed at local and foreign auction houses.