(b. 1971, Talawi, West Sumatera, Indonesia)
Yunizar earned his fine arts degree at the Indonesian Institute of Arts Yogyakarta – a school of national pride in the heart of Indonesia’s artistic and cultural capital. During his studies, Yunizar co-founded an art group called the Kelompok Seni Rupa Jendela together with five other Minang students. Amid the socio-political art that flooded the Indonesian art world after the 1998 Reformation, which saw the fall of the Suharto regime, the KSR Jendela crucially avoided overtly political themes. Instead, the group acted as a sanctuary for the artists to exchange ideas, experiment with form and material, and hone their distinct artistic sensibilities. By the late 1990s, the works that Yunizar produced were a breath of fresh air. Resisting grand, heroic narratives and didactic messages in his work, Yunizar set his gaze instead on the everyday—determined to articulate the feeling and essence, or rasa, of subjects that animated his immediate surroundings.
Yunizar’s crude, childlike style, composed of raw lines and fantastical imagery, may appear naive at first glance, but in fact radiates deep mystery and elegance. His paintings from the early 2000s portrayed haunting human figures in dark, muddy colours, capturing the psyche of anonymous, alienated people. In the mid-2000s, fascinated by vandalisms on bathroom stalls and street corners, Yunizar began incorporating rhythmic, impressionistic scribbles in his paintings, known as his Coretan or “unreadable letters” series. Evading meaning and literal translations, these writings instead evoked an emotional force akin to what one might find in oral traditions, which have a long history within the Minangkabau culture. Over the years, Yunizar has carefully transformed his practice, exploring motifs that increasingly collapse boundaries between the real and the imaginary—from homes and dwellings, to mythical creatures such as the symbolically charged Garuda, enshrined on Indonesia’s national emblem. Then, in 2012, Yunizar unexpectedly ventured into sculpture. Since then he has transformed whimsical subjects, such as village gangsters and primordial monsters, into arresting bronze creations.
Ayam Jantan (Rooster)
2019
Bronze
162 x 216 x 60 cm
The product of Yunizar’s sculptural experimentations at YAL reveal him fluidly evolving from a theme he established in his painting practice: bringing childlike wonder into ordinary subject matters, in which the everyday world serves as a limitless source of inspiration. Yet unlike in his paintings, where oftentimes the presence of rhythmic, impressionistic scribbles—otherwise known as his signature “unreadable” letters, or Coretan series—would create fluid, shapeless, and intuitive marks on the canvas, his sculptures take on bolder, more defined forms. The details, shapes and textures on his sculptural subjects are solid and intricate, which help capture the whimsical qualities of his ever-expanding cast of imaginative creatures. Together, they reveal the artist’s ability to infuse magic into the otherwise banal and mundane. His Rooster sculpture, for instance, depicts a ubiquitous animal in Indonesia—an animal whose crowing punctuates time in villages, whose caring and breeding have become integral part of local traditions. Yet Yunizar’s rooster isn’t naturalistically depicted—the sculpture’s disproportionately large scale and shining bronze medium elevate the animal to the monumental, appearing almost like an enchanted creature that emerged from an ancient or ethereal world. Like in his paintings, the subjects in Yunizar’s sculptures may at first appear outwardly innocent and ‘naive’, but upon closer inspection are filled with depth, complexity and sophistication.