Winnie Sidharta

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My practice centers on painting as a space where personal memory and collective history intersect. I approach the painted surface as a site of accumulation, revision, erasure, and return. Working with paint, paper collage, and assemblage, I construct images that unfold through fragments rather than fixed narratives, allowing materials to guide shifts in composition, density, and rhythm. My paintings draw from visual languages embedded in domestic and diasporic environments: ornamental patterns, architectural details, signage, textiles, and everyday surfaces. Rather than reproducing these references literally, I translate them into painterly structures through gesture, repetition, and layering. I am interested in how decorative systems function within painting—not as embellishment, but as carriers of memory, labor, and cultural inheritance. Material process is central to my work. I repeatedly sand, repaint, collage, and seal each surface, embedding paper fragments, found imagery, and drawn marks into the painted field. These accumulated layers create a tension between flatness and depth, clarity and obscurity, allowing the compositions to remain open-ended and resist singular interpretation. Emotion emerges through material decisions: the temperature of color, the density of marks, spatial compression, and areas left unresolved. Rather than illustrating memory directly, I allow it to surface through texture, structure, and the physical labor of painting. When installed...

Artwork