Limber, 2024

Noor Mahnun’s figurative and still life paintings urges contemplation with a completely different sentiment. She draws on everyday life, fusing elements of realism with the unconventional to render her domestic scenes somewhat curious. Her paintings often depict geometrical patterns that subtly gesture at the boundaries of ornamentation and abstraction, particularly in her diptych pairings between object and decoration that seem to subliminally point towards a certain visual coherency. Many other motifs and details in these works are also redolent of earlier paintings and encounters—Baldi (2024) recalls the posturing from her 90s compositions while Bangku lends new context to her friend’s shophouse in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia that she had first painted in tea (2024). The title of the latter (bangku refers to ‘bench’ or ‘stool’ in Malay) also relates to a wordplay exercise ‘A bangku is…?’ that she often carries out with her students when teaching, stimulating their imagination to create stools out of paper and scrap materials.