Agus Triyanto BR

This work is in good overall condition as viewed. Framed.
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Agus Triyanto BR, also known as Agus TBR, is breaking boundaries in Indonesian art, holding a mirror to the contemporary condition of the young nation. Born in East Java and based in Yogyakarta, Agus TBR studied at the Indonesia Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta (ISI) and has also lived and worked in Beijing. His works are explorations of a postcolonial urban epistemology, bringing forth time and space onto a single canvas to interrogate the psychological and temporal degradation of an urban existence, and positing spaces of hope in these landscapes.

Agus TBR is a chronicler of spatial-time, marking ethereal moments within a movement. On the bottom right of this canvas we see an arm frozen in mid-air, dismembered from the remainder of a man’s body, his expression is one of anguish. The white horse’s hind legs disappear into the torso of a man kneeling on the ground, the severance of time from space allowing the artist producing this fascinating chimeric composition.

The artist’s style leans towards the surrealistic, with meaning created in the contrasts between various objects. His sense of scale is contingent not upon realism but upon importance: the two armed men in the center of the composition are severely out of scale compared to the rest of the objects surrounding it. Each image is carefully chosen to evoke a mood: the carousel amid overgrown weeds in the background is nostalgic in its presentation, harkening back to a time of simple joys in life.

It is as if Agus TBR materializes the spatial-temporal “time lag”¹ of which Homi Bhabha writes, deliberating the disjunctive site between those in power and those left in its influence and cleaves open the potential for postcolonial agency. He mulls upon realities brimming under the surface of our daily existence, but within that, calls for a redemptive hope carried by the innocent youths who carry the possibility of change.

¹ Homi Bhaha, “Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity,” Atlas of Transformation. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/revision-of-modernity/race-time-and-the-revision-of-modernity-homi-k-bhabha.html