Amrus Natalsya

Biography

Sukarno bought the first of Amrus Natalsya’s works when the artist was just over twenty: the wooden sculpture “A Forgotten Blind” hung at a student exhibition in the Sono Budoyo Museum in Yogyakarta. The president later bought the canvas “My Friends” (1959) as well.

Amrus was born on 21 October 1933 in Natal, in North Sumatra; by other accounts the birthplace is Medan, where he later attended high school. He finished elementary school in Natal. His name at birth was simply Amrus. When he went to study in Yogyakarta, “Natalsya” was added to it: a blend of the name of his hometown, Natal, and the name of his grandfather, Syah Alam, a prosecutor who liked to play the violin. His father, according to Indonesian sources, was called Rustam Syah Alam and his mother Aminah; the family was Minangkabau. In 1954 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of Indonesia in Yogyakarta. A year later, in Bandung, at an exhibition held to coincide with the Asian–African Conference, he showed a new wooden work, “Unheard Cries”. The American art critic Claire Holt called him the most original of the young sculptors and wrote of how the suffering and struggle of the spirit found expression at that exhibition. In 1957 his first solo exhibition opened in Jakarta, and it was the first open-air exhibition in the country.

In 1959, together with the painter Batara Lubis and a cartoonist, Sibarani, he represented Indonesia at the International Youth Week in Vienna. On the way back they visited the Soviet Union and China. The following year the mayor of Jeddah invited him to make wooden panels with calligraphy, and during that trip Amrus made the Hajj. In 1960, at a student exhibition in Jakarta, he showed painting on canvas for the first time.

In 1961, with other students, among them Misbach Tamrin, Kuslan Budiman and Adrianus Gumelar, he founded the Bumi Tarung art workshop in Jakarta. At the same time he took part in the work of the People’s Cultural Association (Lekra), which operated under the auspices of the Communist Party of Indonesia.

After the events of 30 September 1965 he was arrested and held in prison without charge or trial until 1973. According to Indonesian sources, his sculptures were burned during the change of government. After his release he began working in a studio at the Ancol Art Market in Jakarta. There he took up a genre new to him, pictures on boards, and they became very popular with collectors. He did not give up wood carving, however. In 1998, at an exhibition at the Jakarta Cultural Centre, his series “Noah’s Ark” was named the best work in the show and was acquired by the museum of Pelita Harapan University. Impressions of that year’s anti-Chinese riots lay behind the series of pictures on boards “China Town”, shown in 1999 at the Mon Decor gallery. Two more solo exhibitions followed, in the same gallery in 2004 and at the Canna gallery in 2005. The largest collection of his paintings and sculptures belongs to the collector Etti Mustafa, who has been collecting his work since 1995. In 2015 a collection of his poems appeared, “Puisi-Puisi Amrus Natalsya”.

Amrus Natalsya died on 31 January 2024 in Bogor.