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Eko Nugroho / Indonesia b.1977 / We are celebrating our Independence Day 2004 / Machine embroidered rayon thread on fabric backing / 41.5 x 46.5cm / Purchased 2006 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Eko Nugroho
Eko NugrohoWe are celebrating our Independence Day 2004
Not Currently on Display
These embroideries are inspired by punk culture motifs and youth clothing designs. Eko Nugroho creates them in collaboration with a group of women who usually embroider patches for denim and sporting apparel in Beringharjo, the famous market in Yogyakarta.
These cartoon-like images show the irreverence with which many young Indonesians regard the elite, such as politicians and government officials, while the speech balloons parody the rhetoric and slogans used by public figures. Many of Nugroho’s characters appear to possess ‘split personalities’ — always divided between what they say and what they do.
Eko Nugroho belongs to a generation of Indonesian artists who emerged in the late 1990s, during a period of social and political upheaval. His energetic work explores the experience of everyday life. With this approach, Nugroho continues the socially critical traditions of earlier Indonesian modern art, but using newer forms like magazines, comics and murals.
As an artist trained in the internet era, Eko Nugroho is exquisitely well-informed about contemporary graphics and draws on sources as various as Dada photo-collage, Pop art and the counter-cultural comic masterpieces of the American Robert Crumb (b.1943). Since 2000 he has also published Daging Tumbuh (Growing Flesh) — a series of photocopied magazines that collects together comics, drawings and collages by himself and various contributors in Yogyakarta and beyond. The anarchic variety of its drawings and collages speaks to the vitality and social engagement of Indonesian artists today.