Art SG

Past
Jan 12 – Jan 15, 2023
Singapore

Art Fair Details:

ART SG
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre
Booth BF04
Jan 12 – 15, 2023

Connect:

(opens in a new window) ART SG
(opens in a new window) @art.sg
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Elmgreen & Dragset, Tailbone (Stainless Steel), 2021 © Elmgreen & Dragset

Pace Gallery is pleased to detail its presentation for the inaugural edition of ART SG in Singapore.

The gallery’s booth will spotlight paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, and new media works by international and intergenerational artists across its program, including key 20th century figures Alexander Calder, Kiki Kogelnik, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and Antoni Tàpies.

These pieces will be situated in conversation with works by contemporary artists Huong Dodinh, Latifa Echakhch, Matthew Day Jackson, Glenn Kaino, Lee Kun-Yong, and Kylie Manning, all of whom joined the gallery between 2021 and 2022. The booth will also spotlight works by David Hockney, whose solo exhibition David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures opens at Pace’s New York gallery on January 13, 2023, Tim Eitel, Elmgreen & Dragset, Lee Ufan, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Kohei Nawa, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto, James Turrell, teamLab, and Brent Wadden. Leading Chinese contemporary artists in Pace’s program—including Liu Jianhua, Qiu Xiaofei, Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhang Xiaogang—will also figure prominently on its booth at ART SG. Underscoring its commitment to supporting artists’ advanced studio practices and boundary-pushing digital projects, the gallery will also showcase recent web3 projects by Loie Hollowell and Leo Villareal in its booth at the fair.

Among the highlights in Pace’s ART SG presentation is Golf Typhoon (1996), a five-foot-tall sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who married in 1977 and worked as artistic collaborators for over 30 years, realizing more than 40 large- scale public projects around the world. Renowned for sculptures, drawings, and colossal public monuments that transform familiar objects into animated entities, Oldenburg, who died this year at age 93, was a leading voice of the Pop Art movement. Golf Typhoon, a bronze, acrylic polyurethane enamel, and aluminum sculpture depicting a lively choreography of golf clubs and balls, exemplifies the two artists’ deep interest in the playfulness of the everyday.

The gallery’s booth will include Alexander Calder’s ca. 1955 sculpture Bird, which the artist created using tin cans and wire, and Louise Nevelson’s 1962 wall relief of abstractions forged from cardboard, newsprint, paint, and paper collage. These works, along with Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s sculpture, speak to Pace’s role in shaping the history of art in the 20th century.

James Turrell’s mesmeric, sensorial installation Rama, Rectangular Glass (2021) will be a focal point of the booth. A major figure of the Light and Space movement, Turrell has dedicated his career to investigating the phenomenological and perceptual possibilities of light, space, and color. Also in the way of installation, the gallery’s booth will include Relatum - play of primitive (2015) by Lee Ufan, who recently opened an extension of his foundation in Arles, France.

Pace’s ART SG booth will bring together paintings by Qiu Xiaofei; Latifa Echakhch, who represented Switzerland in the 59th Venice Biennale; and Huong Dodinh, Kylie Manning, and Matthew Day Jackson, all of whom joined the gallery in 2022. Sculptures in the presentation will include a work from Song Dong’s Usefulness of Uselessness series; Tailbone (Stainless Steel) (2021), a dynamic, reflective composition by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset, whose solo exhibition at By Art Matters in Hangzhou, China is on view until April 9, 2023; and a work from The Surging Waves Chronicles series by Yin Xiuzhen, who recently opened a solo exhibition at Pace’s Hong Kong gallery.

Web3 projects by Loie Hollowell and Leo Villareal will also be presented by Pace’s at ART SG. An NFT from Villareal’s generative Cosmic Reef series, which debuted on the leading generative art platform Art Blocks this year, will be featured on the gallery’s booth. Cosmic Reef draws on an infinite array of sequences in the natural world to meditate on randomness, beauty, and symmetry. The individual works begin with a simple geometry that becomes more complex through composed dynamic layers, each born of a combination of human control and computational chance. An NFT from Hollowell’s recent Contractions series, released as part of a multifaceted partnership between Art Blocks and Pace Verso, the gallery’s web3 hub, will also be exhibited. Contractions is based on Hollowell’s sculptural Split Orb paintings, in which two bifurcated orbs are situated one on top of the other, with the top orb representing the artist’s brain and the lower orb signifying her pregnant belly and cervix. Hollowell’s colorful, textural Split Orb works focus on the visceral experience of vaginal birth. Featuring variations in their hues, saturations, and textures, these orbs reflect, on a conceptual level, the artist’s shifting state of mind and body during childbirth, with each of the colors describing her ranging emotional states. Hollowell’s generative Contractions NFTs, like her paintings and drawings, explore the bodily landscape through a language of otherworldly abstraction.

Featured Works

Latifa Echakhch

b. 1974, El Khnansa, Morocco
Lives and Works in Martigny and Vevey, Switzerland

Informed by how everyday objects and imagery can be transfigured into signifiers of identity, history, and mythology, Latifa Echakhch’s practice takes the form of painting, installation, sculpture, and sound. Describing her work as “a question of power and postures,” Echakhch states she has “no other goals but questioning the world around me.” Night Time (As Seen by Sim Ouch) (2022) belong to Echakhch’s new series of the same name and connects to The Concert, her presentation at the Swiss pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she employed abstract conditions of light, form, and sound theory to provoke an experience akin to “leaving a concert,” in which a visitor’s “heartbeat [is] transformed, more calm, more intense.” The works in this series derive from photographs taken by Echakhch’s friend, the artist Sim Ouch. Characterized by high exposure and enigmatic compositions where bodies and limbs are entangled or twisted, the images capture the nightlife of their community of friends in Lausanne, Switzerland. Echakhch employs a naive fresco method of painting to transpose these images onto canvas, which she treats with a mix of concrete and vinyl glue. Once set, Echakhch cuts into the dense material, a violent and labor-intensive process that leaves cracks and voids in the composition, revealing fragmented bodies in motion below. The striations in the concrete speak at once to geography and the mountainous landscape surrounding her studio in Switzerland, as well as the histories of formalism and abstraction.

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen
b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark

Ingar Dragset
b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway

Tailbone (Stainless Steel) (2021) is a striking, gravity-defying sculpture from Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, who together form the acclaimed artistic duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Rendered in lacquered stainless steel, this large-scale anatomical object seems less human than related to enormous prehistoric fossils or to the lustrous hood of a car. The tailbone’s form has an overt sexual connotation, both in its anatomy and in the allusion to “tail” in its name, but Elmgreen & Dragset’s sculpture is more abstract than erotic. As gay men, their work frequently references gay rights and liberation, exemplified in such works as Gay Marriage (2010), composed of two porcelain urinals whose metal tubing is intertwined. Elmgreen & Dragset believe in a radical reconstitution of body politics toward sexual liberation, and in their work interrogate the sterilization and sexlessness of a post-industrial, technology-centric world, stating in a 2022 interview that bodies are meant to be used: “The problem with metaverse is that it doesn’t smell!” Across their oeuvre, the artists create tongue-in-cheek sculptures that critique life under late capitalism and explore what it means to inhabit a body in the slick contemporary moment. Tailbone (Stainless Steel) provokes narrativization of the body, exposing the gleaming artifice of life in the digital age.

Matthew Day Jackson

b. 1974, Panorama City, California

Matthew Day Jackson’s sumptuously vivid and textural Donner Pass (after Bierstadt) (2022) is an homage to the revered 19th century German-American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, whose enduring portraits of the American West are among the masterworks Jackson has drawn from in a series of recent paintings that explore historical allusions and the complexities and ambiguities of authorship.

Bierstadt’s iconic painting Donner Lake from the Summit (1873) captures a golden-hued view of the eponymous lake from the summit of the infamous Donner Pass. Using a semi-autonomous laser process, which imbues colors and forms with an otherworldly feel, Jackson mines the history of landscape painting, making connections to the conventions of landscape in science fiction, film, and literature, in which the strange and familiar converge. Across his oeuvre, Jackson is drawn to dichotomies, apparent in his exploration of the confluence of beauty and horror in Donner Pass (after Bierstadt); while visually sublime, Donner Lake and Donner Pass were named after the ill-fated Donner Party, a group of American pioneers who migrated to California in 1846 in covered wagons. Trapped by heavy November snowfall, the group spent four months trapped in what is now Donner Pass, and nearly half did not survive the winter. In both Bierstadt and Jackson’s paintings, narrow trees resemble slender figures that might be marching towards the lake, escaping the pass or seeking what is beyond the horizon. Jackson’s 21st century reimagination of Bierstadt’s 19th century painting adds topographical lunar texture to the painting’s surface, resembling the peaks and craters of the moon’s surface. Born and raised in California, Jackson bridges his varied interests, from the fraught history of the American West to the Apollo 11 moon landing, creating resonant, otherworldly paintings that engage in dialogue with the canon of art history and cutting-edge contemporary artmaking techniques.

Lee Ufan

b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, South Korea

Combining artistic practice with philosophical writing, Lee Ufan’s oeuvre is characterized by thoughtful iterations of gestures in slight variations, engaging viewers in a contemplation of abstract forms and vivid restraint; manifesting in sculpture, paintings, and works on paper. Inspired by the radicalism of Arte Povera in the 1960s, Lee and fellow artist Nobuo Sekineledone of Japan’s pioneering postwar movements, Mono-ha. Translating to “School of Things,” Mona-ha emphasized an appreciation of nature and materials while refuting Eurocentric notions of representation. Based on this theoretical framework, Lee would develop seven major series throughout his career beginning in 1968 with his ongoing Relatum sculptures. As the title suggests, a deep coexistence is at play in the form of steel and stone, signifying the relationship between modernity and nature as Other. For Lee, the viewer plays an active, equal role as an element within his artwork rather than a passive observer. In this way, he challenges the viewer to contemplate place within the discourse of durational objects. The artist had initially titled his sculptural series after texts by modern philosophers Michel Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; however, as of 1972, Lee titled all his sculpture of the series, Relatum, extending this designation retroactively. While early Relatum works often incorporated glass, canvas, and rubber, by the 1970s variations were increasingly refined to steel and stone.

Kylie Manning

b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska

Kylie Manning’s dynamic work, Cosmo’s Moon (2022), is rendered as an exploration of spatial order, human psyche, and the merging of landscape and figure painting. The horizon line near the top left of the linen allows the landscape to recede miles back while simultaneously pulling forward by echoing the figures near the center. Through her deft brushwork, Manning challenges viewers sense of space; the horizon line merges into an impression of a mountain, a setting harvest moon, and the face of the left figure, while the green paint implies both foliage seen from a distance and the peppering of the concerned eyes of the figure. Avoiding archetypal relationships, the artist states:

When paintings include two figures, we often find a romantic dynamic between the figures, or a power structure, this is a subconscious relationship we as viewers often attribute to two people. The great goal with this work was to keep that imposed narrative removed from the two figures... the figures read as a psychological conversation between the ego and the id... The figure on the bottom right is less filled in, more ghostly, balancing the weight of the figure on the left with its airiness and loose sketch that is both above and below the original washes.

The dynamism and repetition in the center of the piece implies an exploding molecule or star while also recalling Eadweard Muybridge’s 18th century motion studies. The repeating lines link the two figures, one appears to pass from one composition into the other. The title, Cosmo’s Moon, evokes the lunar surface, which is highlighted through Manning’s energetic mark-making. It speaks to the playfulness and activeness of the piece and references the 1987 film Moonstruck, where one of the characters supposedly straps the moon to his back, bringing it closer for the night. Like the cosmos, the painting is comprised of moments that are both eerily still and seemingly spiraling out of control, emphasized by the colors, composition, and balance. Many of the scumbled and spackled zones within the work stamp a pause and are juxtaposed with long poured stretches and swathes of paint. Transparent oxide earth tones and forest greens have a grounding effect, giving an impression that the left figure is one with the mountain, while the acidic yellow, windy whites, and snowy blues feel simultaneously soothing and threatening.

Golf Typhoon by Oldenburg/van Bruggen — Oldenburg/van Bruggen, *Golf Typhoon*, 1996, bronze, acrylic polyurethane enamel and aluminum base, 61-3/4" x 16-3/4" x 16-1/2" (156.8 cm x 42.5 cm x 41.9 cm)

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen

Claes Oldenburg
b. 1929, Stockholm, Sweden

Coosje van Bruggen
b. 1942, Groningen, Netherlands
d. 2009, Los Angeles

Song Dong

b. 1966, Beijing, China

Song Dong’s Usefulness of Uselessness – Varied Window No. 28 (2020) is a continuation of his Usefulness of Uselessness series, which investigates the cultural implications of found objects, urban life, and repetition. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, this work explores notions of isolation, aesthetics, and the historical significance of windows as barriers between domestic and public spheres. Song Dong compresses the original proportions of the window frames, creating an image reminiscent of a crowded city skyline. The artist has continued his investigations of the varied cultural meanings of windows as barriers between living spaces and the wider world, offering a key perspective through which people view the outside environment. In the process of being opened or closed, windows can alter the relationships between individuals and the external world. Through changes in color and form, they can transform the world’s appearance in the eyes of the viewer. Song Dong’s work builds on the rhetorical and aesthetic significance that has been associated with windows since ancient times. Working with humble remnants of people’s homes, the artist’s materials carry with them a complex history of a city and the lives of its people. Looking closely at the work, viewers become accidental voyeurs, imagining distant homes, personal stories, and perhaps identifying shared experiences of the past.

Yin Xiuzhen

b. 1963, Beijing, China

Closely associated with Chinese history and tradition, porcelain has been the focus of Yin Xiuzhen’s practice in recent years, and its materiality has served as the impetus for significant variability in her sculptural work. Through a nontraditional method of porcelain firing in her Wall Instrument series, Yin realizes subtle yet abundant variation in color and texture on the surface of the work while also allowing the spontaneity of this firing process to serve as a form of stimulation and dialogue. Ultimately, through this process, the original, smooth porcelain plates take on natural undulations, wrinkles, and cracks. The artist also embeds fragments of worn clothes within these pieces, which reveals parts of the clothing within demarcations in the porcelain surfaces. In encompassing the experiences of those who previously wore these clothes, the works mimic a skin-like surface, creating psychological cues and evoking sensory perception from the viewers while acting as poignant carriers of memories.