IBRAHIM

An influential figure in the Indonesian art community, Ibrahim is known for his “intuitive” abstract-expressionist paintings rooted in an acute awareness of feeling; his method of painting being an exploration of inner turbulence. Ibrahim’s arrangement and juxtaposition of every stroke, line, unresolved shape or unfixed contour is an exploration, and a means to achieve the painting’s final composition. For Ibrahim, a painted canvas does not indicate a final product — instead, it presents the inception of a potentially shared human experience.

Ibrahim studied at ISI Yogyakarta in 1996, then moved back to West Sumatra in 2006 to establish his practice and contribute to his local artistic community through teaching. Now, he is back in the city of Yogyakarta to pursue his doctorate in arts. The move and academic pursuit bring a breath of newness to his art practice, while still holding true to his keenness in presenting the interiority of the soul through his brushstrokes. After a successful solo exhibition Flourishing Within the Void in Gajah Gallery Yogyakarta 2018, Ruang dan Kesunyian (Space and Silence) will be his second solo exhibition with the Gallery, which is also his first solo exhibition in the capital city Jakarta. The exhibition will be accompanied by essays from curators and art historians Agung Hujatnika ‘Jenong’ and Carlos Quijon, Jr.

Ultimately, this new body of work reveals the relevance and infinite possibilities of abstraction today, particularly in the Southeast Asian context. In his essay “Ruang dan Kesunyian: Temptations of Texture, Conditions of Abstraction”, Carlos Quijon, Jr. poses the question, “How do we understand abstraction in a contemporary time?” Through Ibrahim’s vividly textured, painterly canvases rife with emotion and memories, Quijon concludes that the artist’s abstraction is “of the contemporary kind — an errant, shifting thing. It becomes a mode of visuality cultivated by and thrives on the temptations of texture, the conditions of refiguring and configuring our memories and our emotional and affective familiarities through paint.”