Maryanto

Maryanto is an Indonesian artist who creates evocative, black and white paintings, drawings, and installations that undermine the romantic language of traditional landscape painting to examine socio-political structures in the physical spaces that he depicts. Through fable-like and theatrical settings, these landscapes are subjected to the whims of colonisers and capitalists through technological development, industrialisation, pollution of the land and exploitation of its natural resources.For S.E.A Focus 2022, Maryanto will present a new body of work that explores the situation of sand mining around Merapi, Yogyakarta. Building on his ongoing research around the pillaging of land in Indonesia, Maryanto investigates the burgeoning exploitation of sand in the area for urban development and global production, at a pace that increasingly exceeds natural renewal.