From 4 July to 12 September 2025, Made Me Dirty is the latest solo exhibition by Indonesian artist Ardi Gunawan curated by Hendro Wiyanto, presenting a body of work at ISA Art Gallery that oscillates between satire, political critique, emotional expression, and cultural mass media observation.
Known for his humorous, grotesque, and deeply personal visual language, Ardi transforms paint into an unruly, “sculptural” material, one that resists control while embracing contradiction. The exhibition captures Ardi’s fascination with mess as methodology. The title, Made Me Dirty, references both the literal chaos of his studio practice and the symbolic grime of navigating labor, identity, and mass culture.
Although originally trained in design and architecture, Ardi’s relationship with painting is tactile and sculptural. Paint splashes not only onto the canvas, but also into everyday life—rupturing the orderliness of his routine as a university lecturer and so-called “white-collar worker.” Through painting, Ardi stages a quiet rebellion: against productivity, against clean rationalism, against the demand to always be clever.
Across all of his works, humor is a survival tool, and figuration becomes a kind of subversion. Ardi does not shy away from problematic or absurd images—whether sourced from Pinterest, commercial stock, or outdated domestic ads. In fact, he leans into their contradictions.
Ardi’s paintings are filled with confusion, awkwardness, and sometimes grotesque joy. They are about art as labor, labor as alienation, and the strange in-between spaces where feeling and image collide. This is Ardi Gunawan at his most unapologetically personal—and political.
Made Me Dirty is both a declaration of process and a manifesto for artistic defiance in an age of overproduction, media saturation, and institutional expectation.
For more information about this exhibition and other ISA Art Gallery programming, visit isaartanddesign.com and follow @isaart.id on Instagram.
