View Finder

ROH is pleased to present the exhibition View Finder by artist Davy Linggar, his second solo exhibition with the gallery. View Finder presents a new series of paintings across both of the gallery’s spaces, extending into and around a custom-built architectural installation developed by architect Andra Matin. In the exhibition, Linggar’s daily painting practice is given center stage to pay homage to the domestic as both a motif and as a context of production, a quotidian anti-dote to the routines of industrial aesthetic labor.

Linggar, born in 1974 in Jakarta, trained as a painter in Bandung as well as in Germany, but abandoned both in favor of an autodidact education in lens-based image-making. It was when traveling through Europe that the artist began taking pictures, which soon extended to videography; since, Linggar established himself as one of Jakarta’s most trusted characters in the creative industry, working across fashion, music, advertising, architecture, and stage design. Linggar’s interdisciplinarity is instinctual and ever-evolving, the result not only of a hybridity of form or process but of the cross-system collaboration.

If these successes taught Linggar the industrial and commercial capacities of the photographic medium, painting has, for him, remained a precious free space, seeped not in any professional framework but rather in the intimately domestic. The artist paints only at home, in the corner of his living room, surrounded by his life—his wife and their two kids, whose presences and creative input often make direct imprints on his work.

These psychosocial-spatial envelopments are directly modeled in the exhibition at ROH, where the artist’s friend and collaborator, the architect Andra Matin, has designed an impressionistic display structure abstracted from Linggar’s family home. Taking visitors from the standard white cube display of the first gallery into a dream-like, speculative wooden architecture in the second, the exhibition urges us to reconsider not only how and where paintings are made but how and where they should be experienced. Linggar proposes the sincere idea that paintings are, first and foremost, quotidian objects—things to live with, around, and through.

The paintings on display form the series Following Mother Nature #1-12, all variations of a single image shot by the artist himself, depicting a pair of crossed hands. The close crop of the image immediately isolates and amplifies the hands, asserting their ability to express emotion. It is unclear if these hands belong to a single person, or if they indicate the embrace of two; this is left for the viewer to interpret. Linggar’s past work has frequently included hands, feet, and other limbs; rather than the directness of facial expression, he calls attention upon how corporeal messaging happens in a myriad of ways, and how images can capture these in all their fleetingness.

Photography, in fact, surrounds the canvases of Linggar, both processually and conceptually. The exhibition title, View Finder, is sourced directly from photographic parlance, in line with past exhibitions such as iso (2020) and Aperture (2022). The repetition of motif across numerous canvases recalls the voracity of commercial image-making, where countless shots are fired within minutes before only a single one is chosen, labored on, and disseminated for consumption. Painting, the ultimate slow-medium, would seem a natural opposite to this mode of working, but Linggar’s patient repetition yields similar results. As Linggar’s motif reproduces on canvas after canvas, we are asked to seriously consider how deeply our understanding of visuality has been altered by the fast shutter and the endless availability of copying.

So what purposes do these canvases serve, as paintings “about” photography? In his process and contemplation, to Linggar, painting may be a site of image reproduction much like photography, but it is also a site of a unique, affective deepening of an image, a place to investigate how images imprint themselves on our minds, or memories, our psychic environments, both private and shared. This is not an effect that diminishes with repetition; in fact, it only deepens it.

View Finder opens by invitation on 21 September 2024 and to the public on 25 September through 27 October 2024. The exhibition is supported by studio andramatin and is accompanied with a text by curator Jeppe Ugelvig. The gallery will be closed on Monday, Tuesday, and public holidays. Follow the gallery’s Instagram account @rohprojects or reach out to [email protected] for further updates on operational hours and public program announcements.

Born 1974, Jakarta, Indonesia
Lives and works in Jakarta, Indonesia

Davy Linggar is a celebrated Indonesian artist who works primarily through the mediums of photography and painting. There is a substantial breadth to his practice in his investigation of the things that constitute an image and its interrelatedness to perception, memory, form, feeling, and experience. His acute sensibilities are then translated into a diverse array of possibilities – be it through moving images, photographs, paintings, or drawings. In establishing a distinctive aesthetic vernacular, Linggar engages with and through architecture, popular culture, fashion, and nature. He deftly negotiates, and finds balance, between many different forms of energies and forces.

Linggar finished his training at the Faculty of Fine Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia in 1995 and at UGH Essen, Essen, Germany in 1997. Selected solo exhibitions include View Finder at ROH, Jakarta, Indonesia (2024); Aperture at ROH, Jakarta, Indonesia (2022); Cut at AAAAHHH!!! Paris Internationale, Paris, France (2022); FILM at The Papilion, Jakarta, Indonesia (2015); Sketch, Photo, Image at Ark Galerie, Jakarta, Indonesia (2008); and Black&White at Gallery Cahya, Jakarta, Indonesia (1998). Linggar has been part of local and international exhibitions, including Transposition 1: Observing The Walking Patterns at Whistle, Seoul, South Korea (2024); Unbearable Lightness at ROH, Jakarta, Indonesia (2024); Frieze Seoul with ROH at Coex Convention & Exhibition Center, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Art Basel Hong Kong with ROH at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong (2023); Companion at Art Basel Hong Kong Satellite, Hong Kong (2021) in collaboration with Gary-Ross Pastrana and Tromarama; iso at AAAAHHH!!! Paris Internationale, Paris, France (2020) with Aditya Novali; After Utopia: Revisiting The Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2015); Pink Swing Park in CP Biennale: Urban/Culture at Museum Bank Indonesia (2005) with Agus Suwage; and the 11th Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2004).