Shadow of Death Painting

Born: 1952, Muar, Johor, Malaysia.
1973-1975, Amsterdam, Holland.
1975-1985, Munich, Germany.
1986-2007, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
At this moment living in Los Angeles, U.S.A.

ALI BIN RAHAMAD: PRIVATE VISIONS OF PUBLIC EVENTS

Oh, What a tangled web we weave
Sir Walter Scott

Ali Rahamad, native of Malaysia and citizen of the world, wends his way through the complexities and conflicts of the modern world with labyrinthine skeins of pigment. Emerging from a humble village of rubber tappers, he displayed precocious artistic gifts, carving novel wood and stone sculptures even before adolescence. Rubber tappers typically use a sharp knife to cut a slice of the bark to tap the raw liquid, and the frequent sight of the workers slicing and carving through the trees may well have inspired Ali to approach wood in a more loving and creative way. Alis art has always been predicated on the urgent need for a healing of the injured environment and its human fallout.
After finishing high school, Ali decided to pursue a career in the arts and left his village for Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. At the Angkatan Pelukis Samananjong (Association of artists of the Peninsula of Malaysia) in Kuala Lumpur, a workshop-oriented curriculum heavily influenced by the British Royal Academy, he was trained in a classical art curriculum and quickly mastered the rudiments of his craft. Longing, however, for more modernistic forms of expression he founded, along with other major Malaysian artists, an avant-garde movement known as Anak Alam (Children of Nature). Perennially restless and eternally curious, Ali left Malaysia in 1971 on a global spiritual and educational quest that carried him to the centers of ancient and modern art. During this journey, he accumulated a storehouse of impressions that left an indelible stamp on his work. In the mid seventies he settled in Wasserburg, Germany where he established a local reputation for his exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the region. During this time, he returned triumphantly to Southeast Asia to exhibit his paintings in his native Malaysia as well as in prestigious galleries in Japan. While residing in Japan, Ali was featured in the Asahi Magazine as the number one Malaysian artist in that nation during the year 1981 and was interviewed on a major television news channel (NHK).