drawing

Arwin Hidayat

Arwin Hidayat

Arwin Hidayat combines primitive and contemporary motifs for his works on paper and in his paintings, and also by folk art inspired refined unique batik pieces. Although many of his works are inspired by his personal experiences and thoughts, his works of art can be seen as a subtle manner to pose questions about socio-economic and moral situation in Indonesia.

Arwin Hidayat loves the medium batik. It is traditionally a method to decorate cloth with motifs, pattern or designs using colour dyes and wax. It requires quite an elaborate manner of painting (writing) by hand, unlike the modern printed textile production for the mass. Although the method can be found in many places in (South-East) Asia, in Java especially this method of cloth decorating has found its high refinement, where every motive has its own meanings, and whom are allowed to use depending on the gender and even ranks of social and heritage. The traces of these batik paintings can be found in his works on paper.

Arwin Hidayat’s artworks have been selected several times for ArtJog, the annual & prestigious contemporary art exhibition in Yogyakarta.

Born:
12 April, 1983 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Education:
Indonesian Fine Arts Institute (ISI), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Artworks by Arwin Hidayat

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Prihatmoko Moki

Prihatmoko Moki

Prihatmoko Moki is a print & silk-screen artist and one of the founders of the Krack! Studio (2012), a studio and gallery focusing on printmaking in Yogyakarta. Other founders are Rudi Hermawan, Sukma Smitha and Australian artist Malcolm Smith. In the same year he was also one of the organisers of LELAGU, an annual art event combining acoustic music and responses with live drawing in Kedai Kebun Gallery, Yogyakarta.

Although he does make solitary prints, drawings, theatre performance and murals, most of his works are series of comic strip silk-screen prints of certain situations. A satirical story telling not always necessarily as criticism but to shine light to the complexity of the matters.

In his works, Moki refers to historical events and myths to approach the issues. He depicts distinctive figures identified from footmen, soldiers to courtiers of the Jogja Kraton (the sultan’s palace) and people wearing everyday’s clothes looking like peasants, placed in a contemporary scene mixed with traditional or symbolic attributes from the glorious past. The whole scene is a metaphor of the hierarchical and sometimes strained relationship between the ruler(s) or people in power and the regular people.

Moki has participated in numerous group national and international exhibitions. He has also been an long and active member of multidisciplinary PUNKASILA art project, initiated by Danius Kesminas, which has performed in Indonesia, Australia, Lithuania and Cuba.

Born:
1982

Education:
Printmaking at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta (Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, ISI Yogyakarta)

Artworks by Prihatmoko Moki

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S.E. Dewantoro

S.E. Dewantoro

S.E. (Gepeng) Dewantoro’s bizarre drawings and artworks explore and question the relationship of man (human) with his surroundings. A complicated strings of web and thoughts about existence, politics, religion. His depictions of bare flesh and human bodies are intense and some challenge the tough Indonesian censorship.

Though he explores different media and materials, working on paper has his preference. He draws directly and almost instantaneously on the paper, connecting the lines and figures he has meticulously imagined in his head.

Next to a fine-art artist, Gepeng Dewantoro is also a performance and theatre artist in Bandung, Indonesia.

Born:
31 December 1972, Solo, Indonesia

Education:
Seni Rupa at The Universitas Negeri Sebelas Maret (UNS)

Artworks by S.E. Dewantoro

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Maryanto

Maryanto

With his activist art, Maryanto has gained international recognition, a number of international art collaboration projects and exhibitions in important art events. His works come into existence from his deep desire to expose the negative ecological damage human brings into the nature and to the living environment.

Maryanto creates evocative, black and white paintings, drawings, and installations that undermine the romantic language of traditional landscape painting to examine socio-political structures in the physical spaces that he depicts. Through fable-like and theatrical settings, these landscapes are subjected to the whims of colonisers and capitalists through technological development, industrialisation, pollution of the land and exploitation of its natural resources. (Source: Yeo Workshop, Singapore)

Maryanto makes artworks that serve as a form of storytelling with the impression of theatrical stage or landscape setting. The work as stories explores and transfers knowledge through historical research, myths and stories combined with the artist’s own artistic imagination and constructed forms. The results are dramatic and romantic black and white installations made of paintings, etchings, rich charcoal drawings that evoke stories and environments. The subject of his ongoing project that commenced several years ago has to do with his curiosity on resources and its effect on a country and politics. In his daily observations of life in Indonesia, combined with his formal training in the arts at the Institute of the Art, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and his subsequent residencies in the Netherlands at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and the Esculea de Orient programme at Casa Asia Barcelona, Spain, as well as his gallery solo shows, he is able to compare and explore the history of colonialism and its role in the allocation of resources. He sees “resource” as a pandora’s box; that a country with big resources could cause tension and conflict between the systems that navigates and governs economics and daily life of the people.

Maryanto recently exhibited at the “Discoveries” section of Art Basel Hong Kong 2016, the Setouchi Triennale 2016, Bazaar Art Jakarta 2016, and Art Stage Singapore 2017. He also participated at the Yogyakarta Biennale 2015 “Hacking Conflict, Indonesia meets Nigeria”, creating a large entrance piece, and the Jakarta Biennale 2015 “Neither Forward Nor Back” as curated by Charles Esche with an installation work “Temah Ruah di Wonocolo”.
(Source: The Artling)

Born:
1977, Indonesia

Education:
Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta (Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, ISI Yogyakarta)

Residency:
The Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2013)

Born:
1977, Indonesia

Education:
Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta (Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, ISI Yogyakarta)

Residency:
The Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2013)

Artworks by Maryanto

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Agung Kurniawan

Agung Kurniawan

Agung Kurniawan is one of the most important contemporary artists of Indonesia. He is an artist who works with a variety of media. Agung Kurniawan has developed his artistic work within the field of concrete socio-cultural activism; he believes an artist has more and larger social responsibilities than simply producing artistic work. His traditional medium is drawing, but lately he works actively with performance art and videography. Although he works with performance art, he refuses to be called as a performer, and preferred to call himself as the director of the crowds in stead. Both as a studio artist and an art activist, he takes up clear positions and his approach often leads him either down to street level or to intervening in bureaucratic structures.

Agung Kurniawan’s work is reputed to be fairly “coarse” due to themes of violence, controversial politics and taboo subjects. The artist started out with book illustrations, drawings and comics, which offered a harsh, often satirical critique of Indonesian society at that time. With his drawing Happy Victim (1996), depicting people hanging upside down while laughing cheerfully, he won a 1996 Philip Morris Art Award and gained international recognition.

His famous trellis works series started in 2006. The series was inspired by an old family photo album from 1974, consisting of a photo diary of the artist’s mother during the last days of her dying father. Agung tried to recreate the personal as well collective memories by working the panels as a kind of comic book where the trellises are the contours of the figures and the shadows cast the blurred memory.

Agung Kurniawan co-founded “Indonesian Visual Art Archive” (IVAA) and co-owner of Kedai Kebun Forum (KKF) in Yogyakarta. His works are to be found worldwide mostly in museums e.g. Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), Singapore Art Museum, as well as in private collection. His recent works include his performance in The Netherlands “Remember Day Parade and after”, during the so-called transHISTORY (Arnhem June 2016) and his video art during the Europalia Festival 2017 (Paleis voor Schone Kunsten / BOZAR / Centre for Fine Art Brussels, Belgium).

Artist’s Statement 2015 (in Bahasa Indonesia, freely translated)

– Tidak ada yang lebih berharga dari seni, kalau ada itupun pasti palsu (Nothing is more truthful than art, if there is any, then it is false)
– Cinta itu sementara, kesepian itu abadi (Love is temporary, Loneliness is forever)
– Kemiskinan adalah ibu tiri seni kontemporer (Poverty is the stepmother of contemporary art)

Born:
14 March, 1968 in Jember, Jawa Timur (East Java), Indonesia

Education:
Archeology, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (not graduated)
Graphic Art Faculty, Indonesian Fine Arts Institute (ISI), Yogyakarta, Indonesia (not graduated)

Artworks by Agung Kurniawan

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Ida Bagus Putu Purwa

Ida Bagus Putu Purwa

Ida Bagus Putu Purwa’s (or shortly Purwa) concept of art works is his continuous search of freedom. His paintings speak about human bodies in a true search and longing for freedom, realising that human existence or ones’ due rights was given to them since birth.

Although the subjects in the paintings sometime take different shape or posture, they are in fact an expression of himself. For this reason the figures are embodiments of the artist himself. His works are expression of this quest to freedom and a reflection of the suffering of this urge to realise his dream.

Wearing mask or face painted to hide agony, jumping high or almost disappear to the side while running, the figures move till the edge of the canvas (or paper) as if they are looking to break out of the frame, looking for freedom outside their confined edges. Inspired by the traditional Balinese dance, the figures appear to dance with vigorous movements, expressing anger and frustration. Sometime those figures stand precariously close to the edge of an imaginary cliff with unknown depth.

The figures somehow seem to realise their own physical limitations and destiny if you like and thus reflects a struggle for self-acceptance, perhaps resignation.

Abounding with heightened emotions and rich cultural traditions, Purwa’s stylised figures draw upon the diversity and vibrancy of his background. Graceful composition showing vulnerable strength and light-footed postures bear the weight of mental burden.

Born:
Sanur, 1 October 1977

Education:
STSI, Denpasar, Bali

Artworks by Ida Bagus Putu Purwa

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