I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih review – a vivid testament to a life lived hornily

Nottingham Contemporary
Life is short, so let’s spend the time we’ve got having sex, the late artist seems to suggest in surreal and defiant paintings

Murni’s world is one of rampant shagging, unbridled hormones and irrepressible desire. Murni – or I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, to go by her full name – was a Balinese artist who shrugged off all the norms and expectations that life chucked at her and instead made art with total abandon. By the time she died aged 39 in 2006, taken by ovarian cancer, she’d left behind a body of ultra-simple, mega-bold, hyper-colourful painting that functions as a testament to a life lived honestly, independently and very, very hornily.

The earlier works here are stranger and more enigmatic than what comes later. Murni paints hybrid figures, half-plant, half-human, part-animal, part-woman. Branches grow out of bare bums, heads poke out of scale-covered fish bodies, long limbs loop and distend, bodies twist and undulate.