Roby Dwi Antono

Roby Dwi Antono was born in 1990 in Semarang, Indonesia, and now lives and works in Yogyakarta. He has said in interviews that he did not attend art school and has no formal arts training, finishing high school and going directly into work, first as a layout designer for a printing and advertising company. He describes teaching himself illustration and design software from the internet and books, and building his visual language independently from popular culture, science fiction film, and manga rather than through academic study. That language centers on wide-eyed children, mythological and fantastical creatures, and dreamlike, panoramic landscapes rendered with a Renaissance-inflected pop surrealist finish.

His early exhibition history includes participation in the 2017 Yogyakarta Biennale and exhibitions at Nanzuka Underground in Tokyo and Gallery Droste in Paris. His international profile expanded through the early 2020s with a solo show, Epos, at Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles in 2021, followed by solo exhibitions with Almine Rech, including TUK in London in 2024 and Tilik Belik: Visiting the Ailing Spring at Almine Rech Turenne in Paris in 2025 to 2026. He has also held a solo exhibition, Samantha, with Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles in 2022. Most recently, his large-scale sculpture Nalakala was installed as a public artwork at Puente Romano in Marbella, on view from 2025 into 2026 with Volery Gallery.

Antono has not received documented major institutional prizes; art-market reference sources explicitly note the absence of formal awards. His recognition has instead built through galleries and exhibition venues rather than critical prizes: a steady widening from regional platforms, including the 2017 Yogyakarta Biennale, to solo programs at Almine Rech, Anat Ebgi, and Thinkspace Projects. That trajectory, and the auction attention that followed it, is generally read in market coverage as evidence of growing institutional and collector interest in his self-taught, pop-surrealist figuration, though no named critic in a major outlet has yet been quoted at length on his work in sources available for this profile.

Antono's auction record is Asih (2019), which sold for HKD 2,500,000 (approximately USD 321,039) at Christie's Hong Kong in 2022; the exact sale date is not published in available sources. That result surpassed an earlier high point, Muram Temaramo (2013), which sold for HKD 2,400,000 at a Phillips Hong Kong sale in 2021. Outside of Hong Kong, his results are more modest and scattered across smaller houses; a drawing, Lonesome Hero #3 (2021), sold for USD 30,000 at Artsy's 2021 "Art Keeps Nonprofits Going IV" benefit auction, a price described at the time as a record within that specific charity context rather than his overall market high. Taken together, the record suggests a market still concentrated in a handful of headline Asian sales, layered over a longer tail of smaller results from online and regional auction platforms, with primary gallery sales through Almine Rech and Anat Ebgi likely representing a larger share of total transaction value than the public auction record shows.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Antono and no independently confirmed authentication protocol; given his current gallery relationships, verification is likely to run through those galleries and the artist's studio. His auction history is short and uneven, with a small number of high results in Hong Kong sitting well above a longer tail of modest prices elsewhere, so any single sale should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable trend line. He is represented, or has been in active recent dialogue, with several galleries rather than a single exclusive representative, including Almine Rech and Anat Ebgi, as well as other exhibiting galleries such as Thinkspace Projects and Nanzuka. No museum is currently confirmed to hold his work in a permanent collection. His exact birth date is not published in available sources, and no reliable public record addresses his ethnicity beyond his Indonesian nationality.