Dini Nur Aghnia

(b. 1995, Indonesia)

Based in Yogyakarta, Dini Nur Aghnia’s artistic practice moves her to intensely observe the daily glories in her surrounding environment in Yogyakarta – from rugged mountains to sprawling fields, which eternally change depending on the time of day.

Dini manifests her humbling encounters with nature in an unconventional way. Rather than trying to emulate a photorealistic rendition of the landscape, she tests the boundaries of landscape painting to explore the depths of her inner worlds and subjectivity. She explores the power of human memory in reconstructing and imagining natural landscapes through the use of negative space and clay pixels. Through this medium, she portrays how each captured moment, from dawn to dusk, exists in her memory—and even in frozen pictures— only in fragments, pixels.

Veering away from painting a complete, fixed image, Dini’s landscapes encourage one to become fully immersed in the subtleties of the present, knowing that the wonders of every moment can never be truly recreated. Her works are a discussion of familiar geographies and a way of capturing the landscapes that she believes are often overlooked. Her brightly-coloured depictions of the Indonesian landscape highlight the small victories we should be grateful for each passing day.

Dini Nur Aghnia studied at the Institut Seni Indonesia in Yogyakarta. She has exhibited both locally and regionally, in Yogyakarta, Solo, Gresik, Surabaya, Singapore and Malaysia.