Hermit Sculpture

Rashid Salleh is a visual artist of Javanese and Indian heritage, born and bred in Singapore. He was raised in a traditional Javanese family where he was taught that culture is the pillar of one’s being. As he grew to acquaint himself with the study of art, he began to be influenced by the eccentricities of Dali and Caravaggio, whom he first came across in a local library in his youth. Rashid’s artwork is derived from the desire to explore the intricacies of the human condition, through juxtapositions of the physical and the metaphysical, and the traditional and the modern. He typically works with acrylic, and more recently “batik”, a fabric heavily associated with Javanese culture. In all of his works, he expresses a passionate desire to deviate from tradition, yet retains ideals of his culture at the same time, albeit in a distorted and fresh, modern light.