Budi Ubrux

“I want my viewers to be intrigued by the figures in my paintings and their realities that exist beyond the prints covering them”
Budi Ubrux is an award-winning Indonesian artist known and popularized by his progressive artwork by painting newspaper cutouts to outline an illustration of deep thought. Initially, Ubrux started as a billboard artist and painter in Switzerland. Later, fetching the Philip Morris Indonesian Art Award catapulted his career to the upper echelons of the art community.
Born 1968 in Yogyakarta, Ubrux had dropped out of art school. After serving as a billboard painter for two years in Switzerland, he held a solo show in Baden, Switzerland. With an aesthetic of mummified bodies in newspaper headlines, Ubrux's work personifies the haunting realities of politics. Essentially, they act as a metaphor for the increasing repression as well as the media's influence over society and how the media increasingly pivots to being manipulative. Ubrux's work perfectly describes how the human mind malfunctions when fed with manipulative media information.
The primary source of inspiration for the artist was the unrest in Indonesian politics and the political oppression paired with the disappointment and disbelief in the prevalent ideologies. Ubrux worded it as finding the "ulcer of corruption"! Print media is a key to having democracy with individuals holding access to information related to the fallacies of the government. However, corruption in print media leads to social manipulation to a large extent with people consuming content that they eventually start to believe. Ubrux's paintings show this overlap of print media on human life, with each headline folding in the mummified, mindless human body.
Ubrux also manages to apply his unique signature style to different statues, vehicles and some installations as well. His paintings have set a mark in the hearts of collectors all over the world!