Pi Artworks is delighted to participate in Art Singapore 2023 with a roster of 6 award-winning artists, whose individual practices tackle the human experiences that shape our current world through a vast plethora of approaches. The gallery’s first time in Singapore, Pi Artworks’ legacy of 25 years spans galleries across London and Istanbul. In Art SG ‘23, the gallery will represent Selma Parlour, Holly Stevenson, Sarah Dwyer, Gulay Semercioglu, and Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, as well as emerging artist Alya Hatta as part of Art SG’s New/Now program.
Upon entering, the viewer encounters “At dusk I think about what we are doing #1-5” (2022), a series of miniature, abstracted forms by British artist Holly Stevenson, recipient of the Mother Art Prize 2020. Suggestive of mother, father, and child relationships, four of the five sculptures contain cylindrical voids suggestive of the belly button, directly referencing Barbara Hepworth’s ‘pierced forms’ - and creating a gesture that allows these sculptures to be looked through as well as in the round. Moving between abstraction and figuration, Stevenson creates an idiosyncratic language through her reimagining of gendered body (ies).
Stevenson’s ceramics are in tandem with Gulay Semercioglu’s “Mediterranean” (2020). A grand and endless composition of tiles, Semercioglu crafts fine-coloured wires into a dense mesh. The artist uses traditional carpet-weaving methods rooted in Anatolian history for centuries, embodying the story of women in relation to family, protection, and fertility. The chosen motif is granted an unwavering prominence, placing the maternal experience at the forefront. Semercioglu calls her pieces paintings, citing the unifying effect achieved through manipulation of material, colour, and texture.
Across the booth, artist Selma Parlour draws references to Shakespeare’s ‘Yonder Cloud’ exchange from Hamlet, creating paintings that reimagine the modernist grid as a site for illusion. With “Salon II”, “Salon III”, “Salon IV” and “Salon XII” (2022), Parlour uses abstraction to re-present representation itself, underscoring the disparity between what we see and what we interpret. Meaning here lies with what the viewer bestows, as these patterns of relation can be read as codified representations of paintings in a salon hang, while still retaining an ambiguity that leaves them open to multiple interpretations. Parlour’s ‘Salon’ series visually complements the work of British artist Sarah Dwyer, whose exuberant colour palettes and lively approaches to mark-making introduce a sense of play to the booth. As seen in “Poets Breath” (2022), her dynamic compositions are the result of processing her own surroundings and the human day-to-day experience. Surfaces, in turn, retain traces of process and development within their own archive and present the viewer with a navigable visual history. Tying the booth together is a live electronic sculpture by Fabio Lattanzi Antinori. Educated in Computational Arts, Antinori is no stranger to Asia, having exhibited at Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul (MMCA) under the International Artist Residency program. Recipient of the First Plinth Sculpture Award 2019/20 and member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, Antinori questions the insidious influence of major ‘Unicorn’ companies over consumer habits and data. “Behavioural Surplus” (2022) thus infiltrates the live search engine database of its environment, displaying highly searched keywords and the price assigned to them by SEO platforms. Meanwhile, in the Art SG 23 New/Now section, Pi Artworks is proud to represent Alya Hatta, an interdisciplinary artist based in London and Kuala Lumpur. In her painting “Her foot was over the line!” (2022), Hatta draws on personal experiences and memories, using the dynamism of colour, form, sound and space to explore the realms of the digital and physical in representing her Southeast Asian identity. Her works aim to portray the colourful intimacies of the diasporic human condition.