Born in 1957, Ivan Sagito studied art at the Sekolah Seni Rupa Indonesia and subsequently at the Institut Seni Rupa in Yogyakarta. Sagito gained critical attention in the late 1980s following his first solo exhibition in Jakarta in 1988. This was followed by an award of Best Painting at the Jakarta Biennale for Young Artists in 1989. The subjectivity in Ivan’s surrealistic paintings is often rooted in the metaphysical notions of Javanese mysticism.In this work, twisted cloths suspending from the top of the picturesque coil around the four bodies in the work. These bodies, however, are incomplete. Heads, limbs and bodies are missing, replaced by the cloths. Heads with only the hair and hands appear illogically in the work. All these echo the title of the work, which means ‘the disappearing bodies’.
