Latiff Mohidin, born in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia in 1941 completed his primary education in Singapore. While in Singapore, at an early age, Latiff’s precocity in understanding paintings earned him the nickname, ‘Wonder Boy’. From 1960-1964, Latiff studied art at Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Berlin, Germany and did brief residencies in Paris and New York. Inspired by his exploration of Southeast Asia in 1964, Latiff has since produced compelling series of artworks – the result of a synthesis between his European experience and the rediscovery of his homeland. He is also a poet who has published several volumes of poetry. The Rimba series is a body of work that flags Latiff’s peak: his most passionate, compelling and surging effort that can be adopted as a criterion for evaluating the dynamics of his creative practice. ‘Rimba 2’ is produced with a complex variety of forceful brushwork, lines and compositional schemes that emerge from the bottom edge, overlap and then race towards opposing upper corners, mimicking the dense undergrowth of leaves, twigs, branches, trunks and roots. The choreography of explosive movements conveys Latiff’s self-challenging proposition: to deepen the level of his work and to develop a new technique that could consolidate a sense of urgency.
