Pearl Lam Galleries presents the current repertoire of the budding Indonesian artist Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi, fondly known as Tepu to his friends. Garibaldi’s art visualizes the tiny and often overlooked workings of nature on a large scale, reminding us of the importance of minute life forms that decompose waste and regenerate new life. In his first solo exhibition outside of Indonesia, Garibaldi puts on view a varied selection of artworks across a diversity of mediums, including stylized paintings of microorganisms, spore prints, and installation art pieces involving mushrooms, moss and orchids. His unique reading of life and nature is evident through the quirky use of organic materials in his art practice.

In the midst of the bustling art market, with local and international audiences clamoring for the loud and obvious, Syaiful Garibaldi stands out quiet but confident, original and yet aware of the great Indonesian masters before him. Starting off as a student of agriculture in university, Garibaldi switched to experimental fine arts and applies his scientific background to create a conceptual foundation for his art. As he peers into his microscope, he records images of cellular growth and uses them as alphabets to create a new language he named Terhah, meaning ‘idea’, a project so thorough it came complete with a dictionary. He then progressively expanded and populate his constructed, imaginative world with small organisms which feature in his prints, sketches, paintings and finally, installation art. The upcoming exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries serves as an arena for Garibaldi to further introduce and make tangible the fascinating world of Terhah in three-dimensional form.