Indonesian draughtsman, born in 1979 in Jayapura, in Western New Guinea (Indonesia).
Life
Noviadi Angkasapura has drawn since childhood, with no artistic training. As a young adult he was visited by a spirit that asked him to draw, around the notions of patience and peace. “It was like a dream, but I wasn’t asleep,” he has said. This spirit also conferred on him the title of Ki Raden Sastro Inggil, which appears on many drawings beside his signature.
Since 2009 he has lived in Jakarta with his wife and their two children. He is represented by the Henry Boxer Gallery in the United Kingdom and by the Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York, which showed his works at the Outsider Art Fair in Paris in 2013 and devoted a catalogue to him.
The work
For Angkasapura, drawing is a prayer and a meditation, within his Muslim faith, and the means of passing on the messages he has received, which he does not claim to interpret. His dense, highly coloured compositions, peopled with figures and enigmatic signs, draw on the Muslim religion, Indonesian iconography and puppet theatre.
He works in ballpoint pen, felt-tip, graphite, coloured pencils and oil pastel, often on salvaged papers and cardboard. He dreams of founding his own museum, the Angkasapura Raden Sastro Inggil museum, which could hold a million drawings.
Exhibitions and collections
- Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
- abcd / ART BRUT, Bruno Decharme collection
- Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris (Bruno Decharme donation, 2021)
- Collection of Mediumistic Art (CoMA) of Elmar R. Gruber, Germany