But Mochtar, born in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia in 1938, first studied painting in the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) before furthering his art studies in Rhode Island School of Design, and the Sculpture Center of New York. A research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1962 to 1963, and the first director of the renowned Indonesia Institute of the Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta in 1984, he has exhibited widely, including in USA, Brazil, Japan and within the Southeast Asian region.‘Dancers’ is an example of the cubist approach adopted by ITB students, including But, during the 1950s where figures are fractured into prismatic planes, creating a pictorial complexity that still retains a semblance of moving, energetic forms.
