But Mochtar

Acquired from the family of the artist
The Papadimitriou family, Indonesia
Private Collection, Indonesia

The sculpture is in good condition. There is evidence of some light dust accretions in the crevices, and indications of wear and handling around the corners, as is consistent with its age, but the overall condition of the art work is good and sound.
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After completing his studies at the Bandung Institute of Technology, But Mochtar studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence from 1960-1961, Sculpture Center of New York from 1961 to 1962, and became a research fellow at MIT from 1961 to 1963. In 1984 he became the first director of ISI (Indonesia Institute of the Arts) in Yogyakarta and was one of the most respected Indonesian modernist of his time.

Hubungan Keluarga (Family Ties) is a powerful imagining of But Mochtar’s most iconic theme: family. But Mochtar has always favoured the portrayal of family as a unit, partly because it took him and his wife a long time to conceive their first child, thus the theme is a prevalent presence in his body of work. The artist had actually planned to create an identical monumental version of this work for the Department of Forestry on the occasion of the 8^th World Forestry Congress at the Manggala Wanabhakti, but because it did not work from a practical standpoint, he drew the same compositional structure while replacing the linear elements with more compact foliage patterns. 

Mochtar’s most successful sculptures are characterized by a tactile surface and angular forms that embrace abstraction. The present work, which is a structure comprising of heavy interlocking geometric forms with a hole combined with radiating linear bars and five supporting legs, is the most outstanding of them. All of the forms are connected by lines that radiate from the central figure, overlapping one against the other so that they are undeniably and dynamically linked.

But Mochtar's sculptures exhibit his exposure to aesthetics of Modernism from the West, embracing the craggy texture of Giacometti's sculpture and Henry Moore's genius at creating a balanced composition. Executed circa 1970s, Hubungan Keluarga embodies the balanced, architectural structure that became pivotal to the artist's iconography. The surface seems to be weathered, eroded, and pared down to its most elemental structure, yet this appearance of brittleness is deftly countered by its solid form, which lends a sense of strength and endurance to the work. The subject matter of family unity was one of Mochtar's chief preoccupations throughout his long career and Hubungan Keluarga is emblematic of its importance in the artist's vision as life's core foundation and pillar of fortitude against all external forces.