Kemal Ezedine

Artist Kemal Ezedine was born in Yogyakarta in 1978, and currently resides in Bali. He studied at the Faculty of Art and Design at the Bandung Institute of Technology. Kemal focuses himself on creating and exploring the world of drawing, painting and printmaking.The theme of Kemal’s works often revolve around the concept of social human identity in relation to culture, religiosity, and politics.

Kemalezedine is also a part of the Neo-Pitamaha group in Bali, which studies and experiments with Indonesian and Balinese drawings and paintings. Inspired by the unique qualities of the Balinese art form called Rerajahan, Kemal himself focuses on creating hybrids, adopting the Balinese style and infusing street art into his work. He combines this with the philosophical influence of Islamic art studies, which he also applies to his works. Another big influence for Kemal is the prohibition of animate figuration within Islamic ideology and how to navigate this as a contemporary artist.

The artist held his first solo exhibition in 2012 at S.14 Bandung and has continued to participate in a selection of national and international exhibitions, with most recently a solo exhibition at CG Artspace, Jakarta, in 2021 and the somewhat infamous exhibition ‘Erotika’ at Sika Gallery, Ubud, Bali in October 2022.