Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“To me, art equals responsibility”. That is probably why Alain Séchas creates works according to the human scale, immediately evoking the human body. But rather than using the human figure, he chose that of the cat: a round-eyed feline which never smiles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This selection of poster prints of Wong Ping’s animations includes the films Jungle of Desire, Doggy Love, Slow Sex, An Emo Nose, and Stop Peeping . They serve as a glimpse into the discourse and intricacy of the artist’s imagined, yet responsive approach to his realities. The series of posters echoes the once-vibrant aura of movie posters, when they were designed by artists and designers to encapsulate the tone, story, and visual style of a film in one large image, and were often as iconic as the movie itself.

Painting (Painting)

Juego de Banderas (a play on words that loosely translates to both set of flags and game of flags) is a triptych of modified Colombian flags by Antonio Caro. Although the yellow, blue and red stripes on the first flag are faithful to the original, the second flag at the center has been modified to feature the word Colombia, emulating the typography and white-on-red design of the iconic Coca-Cola brand. Caro’s first version of this logo was a 1976 graphite drawing, and he has since produced several variations in different materials.

Painting (Painting)

In her geometric paintings on wood panel, Madriz employs the Fibonacci numbers to illustrate, in simplified form, the pattern of natural plant growth—beginning from a single stem, and growing exponentially, rationally, and efficiently outward from there. Tinting the underlying wood but not covering it, Madriz’s delicate cubes seem to hover on the surface of the warm wood surfaces, drawing more attention to the grain and its own natural pattern. Always drawing the attention back to the natural world, Madriz’s multimedia works aim to reassert the natural, and our own links to it.

Photography (Photography)

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.

Painting (Painting)

Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot. The arrows and directional lines suggest movement, but the forms they point to intertwine, prohibiting a straightforward reading. The shapes are as illustrative as a Rorschach inkblot; in their confounding, simple indeterminacy, they depict nothing and everything at once.

Painting (Painting)

Adnan’s paintings are simple images with bold contrasting colors and rich textures. This particular work has an iconic feel and a strong physical presence in spite of its diminutive size. All of her paintings are small but, like Howard Hodgkin’s work, their intensity gains from their diminutive size.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part of an installation commissioned by National Gallery Singapore, The Weaver’s Lament by Erika Tan addresses the invisibility of women textile artists and their labor. Tan’s video focuses on the story of a forgotten weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom. A minor figure in the exhibition histories of what was formerly known as Malaya, Abdullah’s loom was left behind at the end of the exhibition, now residing in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Painting (Painting)

Parrot Drawings or Paintings look like children’s drawings and seem quite innocent. The parrot in both the Garden of Eden and the harems are associated with the symbol of purity and innocence. These symbols are found in Renaissance painting, especially in the Annunciations or the Virgins and child and later in Flemish portraits.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s performance Illusion of Matter establishes a dream state through a composition of motifs that were drawn from the artist’s childhood memories. Ramírez-Figueroa recreated the components of the dream as giant props made out of polystyrene, and set in a colorful yellow and orange mise-en-scene. Throughout the performance, the props and set are activated and demolished by children under the artist’s direction.