COVER STORY · MAY 2026
In dialogue with Roby Dwi Antono
FVTVRIST Magazine // Text by Anna S.
1 May 2026
Roby Dwi Antono began drawing in charcoal outside his father's blacksmith studio in Central Java, copying manga and film characters from memory. Today, working from his studio in Yogyakarta, he is one of Indonesia's most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, with a practice that has carried his personal mythology to Tokyo, London, Paris, New York, and beyond.
Represented by Almine Rech across Europe, the UK, the United States, and Shanghai, Roby has staged four solo exhibitions with the gallery in three years: That Peculiar (Brussels, 2023), TUK (London, 2024), and most recently Tilik Belik: Visiting the Ailing Spring (Paris, 2025). His work was presented at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 on Almine Rech's booth, alongside leading Asian voices including Minjung Kim, Li Qing, and Tomokazu Matsuyama. In parallel, his monumental bronze Nalakala has stood since 2024 in the Mediterranean gardens of Puente Romano Marbella, a 2.75-metre figure carrying his visual language beyond the canvas.
His visual world is immediately recognisable: large-headed children, hybrid creatures, a personal cosmology drawing equally from Renaissance portraiture, Pop Surrealism, and the Javanese landscape of his childhood. From Epos (2021) to That Peculiar (2023), the work moved from heroic presence toward something quieter, eyes disappearing, gestures loosening, water moving in. Between Rumpus (Tokyo, 2022) and TUK (London, 2024), precision gave way to a more open hand.
Across this conversation, Roby returns to the questions that have shaped his work for over a decade: memory as cosmology, the fragility of myth, the slow surrender from precision to gesture, the cost and freedom of being self-taught. Ahead lie ARTJOG 2026 and his solo exhibition at MOCA Bangkok, where the personal, in his words, opens into the collective.
Ningrum, Oil on Canvas, 2025
Courtesy of the artist
Robi Dwi Antono portrait © Courtesy of the artist.
You began drawing with charcoal outside your father's blacksmith studio, copying manga and film characters. Years later, a solo exhibition in 2012 shifted your path. What changed between those two moments?
It wasn't just technical ability that changed, it was how I understood why I draw at all. When I was young, drawing was very intuitive. I copied what I saw, mostly from manga and films. There was this feeling of admiration, a wanting to get closer to something that felt visually exciting to me.
But after my solo show in 2012, I started to see that an image could become something much more personal. I began asking myself, why do I keep coming back to certain forms? Why do certain characters pull at me? What am I actually carrying from my own life?
The shift was slow, but it went deep. From imitating, I moved toward building a real relationship with memory, with the body, with things from childhood. Drawing stopped being just an end product. It became a way of understanding things I hadn't fully recognized in myself before.
Behind the Scene
© Courtesy of the artist, photo credit by Moza Alatta
You are self-taught, which placed you outside the institutional path of the Indonesian Art Institute in Yogyakarta. Did that distance shape how you understand your work today? Is there something you could only have found outside the institution?
Growing up outside an institution meant there was no clear structure to follow. That made me doubt myself a lot, I never really knew if what I was doing was "right" or not. But from that uncertainty, I found a kind of freedom I probably wouldn't have discovered through a more formal path.
Without a fixed reference, I had to build my own rhythm. A lot of my visual decisions didn't come from theory, they came from intuition, from doing things over and over. There are things you can maybe only find outside an institution, a way of working that isn't too tied to academic references, the courage to be wrong, the courage to make something that feels truly yours. But of course, it comes with a cost. The process takes longer. And it can be quite lonely.
Behind the Scene
© Courtesy of the artist, photo credit by Moza Alatta
Roby Dwi Antono
Photo: Moza Alatta
In Epos (2021), your figures carried a mythological and almost heroic presence. In That Peculiar (2023), the eyes disappeared completely. What does it mean for you to remove the gaze?
The gaze in a figure always carries direction, it pulls the viewer toward a certain emotion. When I started taking away the eyes, it felt like cutting the most direct line of communication. Not to close things off, but to open up other possibilities.
Without eyes, the figure becomes more ambiguous. It's no longer "looking" at you, but it's still there. A distance opens up, and inside that distance, the viewer has to find their own way in, their own connection. For me, it also relates to interior experience, how we feel something deeply without being able to put it into words. Removing the gaze was a way of bringing that feeling into visual form.
Elements like the Kotes fish, Watu Ngorok, or the banyan tree feel deeply rooted in a specific place, yet they form a complete world. When did you begin to see these memories as a larger cosmology?
At first, I didn't think of memory as something large. It was just fragments. Places, sounds, stories, and small objects from when I was little. But the longer I worked, the more I started to see that those fragments weren't separate from each other.
They connected. They formed patterns, even a kind of cycle that kept returning. That's when I began to understand memory almost like a cosmology, a world with its own rules, its own rhythm, its own internal logic.
There wasn't one clear moment when I realized this. It was gradual. I slowly started to believe that things which are very local, very personal, can actually open into something much bigger, maybe even universal.
In Tilik Belik, the belik is both physically and culturally fading. Do you feel that myth disappears before the place itself, or after?
I feel that myth and place have a very fragile relationship. In many cases, myth disappears first because it depends on stories being passed on. When a generation stops telling them, the myth slowly fades away.
But at the same time, when a place changes or gets damaged, myth also loses its footing. So it's not a one-way relationship. They hold each other up, and when one weakens, the other feels it too.With the 'belik', I've seen how physical change and shifts in the way people live happen together, and in that space, myth becomes harder and harder to hold onto.
WITHOUT A FIXED REFERENCE, I HAD TO BUILD MY OWN RHYTHM. A LOT OF MY VISUAL DECISIONS DIDN'T COME FROM THEORY, THEY CAME FROM INTUITION, FROM DOING THINGS OVER AND OVER. THERE ARE THINGS YOU CAN MAYBE ONLY FIND OUTSIDE AN INSTITUTION, A WAY OF WORKING THAT ISN'T TOO TIED TO ACADEMIC REFERENCES, THE COURAGE TO BE WRONG, THE COURAGE TO MAKE SOMETHING THAT FEELS TRULY YOURS.
Your daughter's name is Laut, meaning ocean. Around the same time, water became central in your work. Was this connection intentional?
I never consciously planned that connection. Laut was given by Titis, my wife. But as time went on, I started noticing how both seemed to emerge around the same period, and how they resonated with each other.
For me, water isn't only a visual element, it's a metaphor. For origin, for flow, for something that keeps moving and keeps changing. The depth of the sea feels mysterious, holding a kind of darkness that is dense and unknown, like the uncertainty of what's still to come. The name Laut may have become a marker that made me more aware of all that.
So the connection feels organic. It wasn't planned from the beginning. It was something that appeared, and I understood it only afterward.
In TUK, you describe the act of digging for water as a metaphor for filtering yourself before passing something on. Did this idea come through painting, or from life outside the studio?
The idea of "digging for water" as a way of filtering yourself, that came from life, not from the studio. But painting became the space where that idea got clearer.
I don't see painting as a way to resolve things. More as a way to show the process itself. In many ways, what I paint actually makes me realize I'm still inside that process.
There's a layer of reflection that moves between life and practice. They shape each other, but they don't always complete each other.
Roby Dwi Antono, installation view, Puente Romano Hotel, Marbella, Spain
A project by Volery Gallery
© Courtesy of the artist
Between Rumpus (Tokyo, 2022) and TUK (London, 2024), your painting shifted from precision to a more open, gestural language. What led to this change?
The move from precision to gesture wasn't something I decided overnight. It came from a feeling that working in a very controlled way was starting to feel narrow. I wanted to make room for things that couldn't be fully predicted, texture, the movement of the hand, even mistakes. In gesture, there's a different kind of honesty. It's not always clean, but it feels closer to how the body actually experiences things. This shift also changed how I think about time at work. I wanted the process to feel present, not just the finished result.
Installation view of Roby Dwi Antono's 'Tilik Belik: Visiting the Ailing Spring',
on view at Almine Rech Paris, Turenne (Front Space), from June 14 to July 26, 2025
Photo: Nicolas Brasseur
With Nalakala, your work moved into public space in Puente Romano Marbella. How does it feel to see one of your figures exist outside the painting?
Seeing a figure leave the canvas and exist in public space felt quite strange for me. In a painting, the space is intimate, controlled. In public, the work becomes part of something much larger, something you can no longer fully hold. There's a feeling of letting go. The figure isn't only mine anymore. It starts to interact with other people, with the space around it, with contexts I never anticipated. And that's exactly what makes it interesting. New possibilities open up when the work is no longer inside the familiar limits of its medium.
Mbrebes Mili, 2025
Oil on canvas
On view at Almine Rech Paris, Turenne (Front Space), from June 14 to July 26, 2025
Photo: Nicolas Brasseur
Your upcoming projects include ARTJOG 2026 and a solo exhibition at MOCA Bangkok. What are you building toward with these two exhibitions?
I see both exhibitions as a continuation of what I'm already in the middle of, not an endpoint. Before, I was going deeper into water, the body, memory, and how those three connect in a broader context. This time, I'm trying to go further into the idea of a fragile journey of memory, and into themes of generation. I'm also curious to see how a work can move between what is deeply personal and what becomes more collective. There's a desire to build an experience that isn't only visual, but emotional and reflective too. More than trying to "achieve" something, I see these exhibitions as a chance to bring together the many layers I've been working through for a while now.
About Robi Dwi Antono
Roby Dwi Antono (b. 1990, Semarang, Central Java) lives and works in Yogyakarta. Self-taught, he developed his practice outside the institutional path of the Indonesian Art Institute, building a visual language that has come to define a generation of contemporary Indonesian painting.
His work fuses Renaissance portraiture, Pop Surrealism, and the Javanese cosmology of his childhood, populated by large-headed children, hybrid creatures, and mythological figures suspended between memory and dream. Across more than a decade of practice, the work has moved from heroic precision toward a more open, gestural register, marked by a sustained inquiry into water, the body, and the fragile passage of memory across generations. Robi Dwi Antono is represented by Almine Rech across Europe, the UK, the United States, and Shanghai, with whom he has presented four solo exhibitions: The Wall: Roby Dwi Antono (Brussels, 2022), That Peculiar (Brussels, 2023), TUK (London, 2024), and Tilik Belik: Visiting the Ailing Spring (Paris, 2025). His work was presented at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 on the gallery's booth, alongside leading Asian voices including Minjung Kim, Li Qing, and Tomokazu Matsuyama.
His monumental bronze Nalakala (2024), produced with Volery Gallery, stands in the Mediterranean gardens of Puente Romano Marbella, a 2.75-metre figure carrying his visual language into public space. Earlier solo exhibitions include Rumpus at Nanzuka Underground (Tokyo, 2022), Samantha at Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles, 2022), Epos at Thinkspace (Los Angeles, 2021), and POPULAR at Villazan (Madrid, 2022). Forthcoming projects include a presentation at ARTJOG 2026 and a solo exhibition at MOCA Bangkok.
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