Contemporary Indonesian art

Indonesian contemporary art

Andy Dewantoro

Influenced by the sensibilities of European 19th century landscape painting, Dewantoro applies a newly mediated sense of the romantic sublime to his depictions of urban landscape, which although always located in Indonesian cities, are emptied of of human presence and curiously devoid of specific local reference.

Seeking to remind us of the increasing distance between the natural and urbanised worlds, Dewantoro's subversion of genre substitutes the airport, factory or motorway flyover for the mountain range, ravine or romantic ruin.

Mella Jaarsma

Mella Jaarsma interrogates the notion of "identity as a transient invention" through works that posit the use of clothing and decorative fabrics as a kind of architecture; a 'home' in which true autheticity is found beneath its layers.

Handiwirman Saputra

In Handiwirman Saputra's enigmatic paintings and sculptures, cast-offs and commonplace objects are re-assembled into works which at once suggest familiarity and the unknown.

Teasing new form and narratives from mundane, overlooked materials such as packaging, fabric scraps, old furniture and abandoned machine parts, Saputra's particular gift is to imbue his reconstituted materials with unexpected sensuality.

Haris Purmono

Haris Purmono's career is marked by hiatus: having made a name for himself in the late 1970s with polemical installations featuring doll-like baby figures ("Each Indonesian child, newly born, carries the burden and debts of our past deeds"), he abandoned fine arts in the mid 1980s to become a graphic designer.

Recently, Purmono has returned to art-making, reviving his central motif of the new-born with far more sinister overtones.

Purmono's babies are now tattooed; partially conceal weaponry such as bayonets in their swaddling/bandages; or are depicted within easy reach of cruelly-barbed dummies (pacifiers).

While such iconography can seem heavy-handed, it clearly doesn't lack impact. Purmono's vision of a generation ineluctably branded by the unspecified sins of the past, present, and possibly their own future, are increasingly popular with collectors and certainly provide Indonesian art with one of its more distinctive voices.