If you’re local to Melbourne, you may well have seen the works of Nani Puspasari in your travels, for instance an office wall here, a mural there, or even a Uoouoo over here (that one was in Prahran). Whether you’ve seen them or not, nothing quite prepares you for a Puspasari solo show, a veritable carnevale of quirk and colour. Her latest one , Childhood Cheeks, Grown-Up Madness, is currently showing at Manningham Art Gallery in Melbourne’s Doncaster East.
The media Puspasari primarily uses to let us glimpse into her world are a combination of 2D paintings and, more predominantly, 3D ceramic sculptures varying in size from half a metre tall to perhaps 20 centimetres high (the majority of which are on sale for decent prices). The meaning and relevance of the exhibition’s title is explained well through the artist’s statement, which mentions the ‘subtle interplay between innocence and experience’, summarising her exhibition as the ‘delightful chaos inherent in the shift from carefree childhood to the intricate realities of grown-up life’.
With these notions in mind, this exhibition – indeed, arguably, Puspasari’s entire oeuvre – could be interpreted as a dimension in which childhood and adulthood are permanently interwoven, sometimes at peace with each other, sometimes at odds.Â
Examples of this are throughout her works in this show, starting with the table full of sculptural oddities that dominates the first room as you enter the gallery. This features a towering central figure with golden smiley and frown faces for eyes. Surrounding this figure, on a bed of carpet, cushions and assorted fabrics, is a wild menagerie of ceramic characters, animals, playfulness and symbolism. Behind this table are a painting and shelves full of more diverse sculptures.
Puspasari’s personality and message are evident in many of the names of the pieces, with titles such as Why Do We Make Things Complicated, Sassy Power Up to Turn Lemons into Lemonade, Stop and Lick the Flowers and Stop and Smell the Flowers Because Common Sense is Overrated (you can see them all in the exhibition’s online catalogue). Her paintings in the second, adjoining room also clearly show the childhood/adulthood paradox, with paintings of childhood joys such as flowers, strawberries and rubber ducks, mixed with adult concepts like face masks and smoking.
There are many recurring themes and images in Puspasari’s work, most notably herself – her face and/or body are somewhere in the majority of her works, but this never comes across as egotistical, because she presents/manifests herself in a such a way that it’s not actually her, instead some version of herself that’s in some kind of surreal circus, perhaps along the visual lines of Tim Burton’s film Beetlejuice or almost any movie by Terry Gilliam.
Two examples of this are the sculptures Hide & Seek and Life on Mars, the former a totem pole with three heads; two are hers, one is a tiger’s (with a mandarin on top, naturally), and the latter shows herself in some sort of space suit/diving suit that looks like an orange (and she’s standing on a tiger, naturally).Â
Along with herself, the artist’s work is filled with other recurring characters/motifs such as tigers, fruit, cake, horses, playful smirks, self-assured annoyance and flipping the bird. Despite the recurrence of these characters and ideas, however, they never seem to say the same thing twice – it’s as if Puspasari has a toy box full of characters and each artwork is the result of her putting two of them together, just to see what they do.Â
The symbolism that results from this is rife throughout her work; indeed, the painting on the wall behind the main centrepiece shows an Eden-like environment, called Playdates for Grown-Ups. It harks back to one of her earlier works, a monumental diptych entitled Garden of Earthly Mischief that she displayed in SOL Gallery in Fitzroy back in April last year. Both of these works, the diptych and the one here in Manningham Gallery, are two-dimensional versions of her landscape of sculptures – playful and joyous, but also thick with symbolism.Â
Read: Exhibition review: Neoterica, Adelaide Festival
Unlike Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, Puspasari is neither staying in childhood nor growing up; she is happily dodging both the loss of the former and the pressures of the latter by creating a world which combines them, a world which her exhibition invites you to visit.
Childhood Cheeks, Grown-Up Madness by Nani Puspasari will be on display until 6 April 2024 at Manningham Art Gallery, 687 Doncaster Road, Doncaster Victoria.
