Lemuel E. Saputra (b. 1998, Salatiga) is an Indonesian painter based in Boston, MA, USA. His work engages with painting and photography in Indonesia’s colonial history as a space of encounter between colonizer and colonized subject. Embracing the limitations and tensions inherent with both mediums–fixedness and plasticity, indexicality and invention, specificity and illegibility, proximity and distance, singularity and reproducibility–images are translated and mistranslated onto the painting surface using image transfer, collage, assemblage in combination with the language of painting. His multimedia work explores the capacity of both photography and painting to simultaneously contain so much while revealing so little.

Lemuel is a candidate of Boston University’s MFA Painting graduate program. He has shown work in Indonesia with Srisasanti Syndicate, including participation in Art Jakarta 2024, Art Jakarta Gardens. In 2023, he was a finalist in UOB Painting of the Year (established artist category), and exhibited in ARTJOG MMXXII in 2022.