Earthly Evocations:
Indonesian Art Now

17 May - 17 June 2012

Curatorial Notes | The Artists
S. Teddy D.

by Valerie C. Doran ©2012

S. Teddy Darmawan, known as S. Teddy D., was born in 1970 in Padang, West Sumatra. He studied painting at the Indonesia Institute of the Arts (Institut Seni Indonesia) in Yogyakarta and has been a fixture on the Yogyakarta arts scene ever since. S. Teddy D.’ s explosive energy finds expression in a range of media, from paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures to performance art. In his energetic, passionate and often humorously ironical work, S. Teddy also creates a kind of mythological world; not a mystical one like Nasirun’s but rather a mythology of the everyday. S.Teddy D.’s mythology is populated by images of his family, his friends, the family dog, his neighbourhood, military symbols (his father was an army officer), things that he sees on the street or images that accost him on TV, and, of course his own selfportrait, standing alone or inserted into different contexts. He even creates literal theatres for the dramas of the everyday: small stage-like constructions in which objects symbolizing isolated moments in his life are theatrically arranged.

Like Bob Sick Yuditha and EddiE haRA, S. Teddy is drawn to counter-cultural emblems, and graffiti and tattooing are just as important methods of self-expression for him as are painting and sculpting. While his art is humorous and playful on the surface--as for example in the two-storey high installation of seven pink army tanks he created for the Singapore Art Museum (Love Tank, 2009), there are often serious issues at its core, in particular the search for individual freedom and social justice. Recently S. Teddy has been fascinated with the spontaneity and irrevocability of painting with Chinese ink-and-brush on paper, and his Freedom Escapism series of ink-on-paper self-portraits reveals the masterful way the artist has infused the lightning-quick strokes with a sense of his own vulnerable humanity.


Two Face | Chinese Ink on Paper | 150x100 cm | S. Teddy D.©2012
Two Face | Chinese Ink on Paper | 150x100 cm | S. Teddy D.©2012
Freedom Escapism #2 |Chinese Ink on Paper | 150x100 cm | S. Teddy D.©2012
Freedom Escapism #2 |Chinese Ink on Paper | 150x100 cm | S. Teddy D.©2012

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