July 2023 Vol. 86

Distillery District Magazine is an intuitively interactive digital magazine created to highlight Art, Culture, and Lifestyle.

Cover Artist:

Born in 1973 in Padang, West Sumatra, Rudi Mantofani studied sculpture at the Indonesian Institute of Arts (ISI) in Yogyakarta from 1993 to 1996. In Indonesian contemporary art presently, the early to mid-90s generation artists from ISI have risen and consolidated their places as leading figures. During a time when art-making was strongly influenced by socio-political exigencies, the group marked their emergence in Yogyakarta presenting artworks which bore no apparent conceptual or visual linkages with the turbulent realities of 1990s Indonesian political and social life. Instead of flashpoints and conflicts, the artists of the Jendea Group explore aspects of the transcendental, the overlooked and the banal. The imageries employed in Rudi Mantofani's visual world reveal such an orientation. His works alternated between surrealism and abstraction, frequently conjoining the two disparate modes into a perspective entirely unique to the artist.