We might be at the tail end of Singapore Design Week but there’s still plenty of art to soak up on our shores. Here are our top picks.
Ryan Gander: Portrait of a Blind Artist Obscured by Flowers
Ryan Gander: Portrait of a Blind Artist Obscured by Flowers (through Apr 11)
UK-based artist Ryan Gander, who is best known for his tongue-in-cheek visual puzzles, oddly assembled projects and stirring work about disability, exhibits the results of his work with paper and printmaking. Highlights include a provocative series of prints alluding to financial crime and a reimagining of the iconic 19th century Japanese woodcut The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
New British Inventor: Inside Heatherwick Studio
New British Inventors: Inside Heatherwick Studio (through Apr 12)
Artists Imagine a Nation (through Apr 19)
Spanning eight decades and representing diverse viewpoints of local people and places, this exhibition of figurative works brings together 80 pieces from 36 artists, with some dating back to the 1930s. Belonging to private collections, some of these pieces are being exhibited for the first time.
Mad Love
Mad Love (through Apr 26)
Artists such as Hong Kong photographer Wing Shya, Japanese street artist Madsaki, Swiss artist Natanel Gluska and many more from around the world explore and interpret love, sex and desire through their various artistic mediums.
Kim Joon and Hosook Kang
Kim Joon and Hosook Kang (through May 31)
A double bill of two noteworthy Korean artists who couldn’t be more different from each other. Kim Joon (who’s exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery) creates loud graphic digital prints filled with pop culture symbols, tattoos and female nudes, while Hosook Kang has a more painterly approach to art, creating flower- and sunburst-like abstract pieces using multiple layers of paint.
A Universal Truth (Apr 10-Jun 10)
Fresh from making her Southeast Asian debut at Art Basel in Hong Kong, artist Monica Dixon will be taking her paintings to Singapore. The American-born, Spanish-based painter explores the difference between who we are and what we are through her deceptively simple images. Her Landscape series sees lonesome houses sitting calmly on vast plains as she explores the difference between a home and a house.
Hugging The Shore
Hugging the Shore (Mar 27-Jun 14)
This is Singapore-born artist Simryn Gill’s first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia. This retrospective brings together several photography-centric bodies of work, like Standing Still, which documents Malaysian building projects abandoned in the wake of the Asian financial crisis in the ‘90s. Her new work involves the leaves of the sea apple tree, which is common around the region, and it gradually perishes throughout the exhibition period, highlighting the lifespan of the work.
Prudential Singapore Eye
Prudential Singapore Eye (through Jun 28)
A collaboration between giants Saatchi Gallery, the Parallel Prize and Prudential, this big-deal group exhibition showcases the best of Singapore’s artists across diverse media and genres. Names to look out for include Donna Ong, Kumari Nahappan, Ho Tzu Nyen, Charles Lim and Jane Lee. Psst, admission is free on the first Monday of each month and there’ll also be free guided tours happening at 5pm.
