We are pleased to return to West Bund Art & Design, in its 10th edition, with a key selection of critical artists from the gallery’s programme. Featuring: André Hemer, Yeo Kaa, Alvin Ong, Patricia Piccinini and Hadieh Shafie.
André Hemer (b. 1981) is a painter whose work investigates the bounds of materiality and appearances, and what it means to create paintings during a time in history in which the experience of an object is continuously blurred between physical and digital states. Hemer scans physical objects – three-dimensional paint forms or found objects such as flora – en plein air to capture a version of the object, and its surrounding exposure to the natural elements of the sun, sky and lights from the scanner.
Yeo Kaa (b. 1989) is one of the leading painters in Southeast Asia, whose signature candy-coloured style celebrates various emotional complexities that range from resistance, rebellion, anxiety, contemplation, and the individual. She is known for mixing a vibrant palette with doll-like figuration with jarring imagery – to shock and evoke discomfort to some, while easing the sensitivity of confronting real-life horrors to others.
Alvin Ong (b. 1988) is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, UK (2016) and the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2018). His paintings playfully capture quotidian moments of our contemporary world in surreal bodily compositions, playfully combining diverse visual vocabularies. Through vignettes of everyday life, the vocabulary of the mundane is transformed into a site of spectacle, a cabinet of curiosities in which audiences are implicated as flaneur and voyeur.
Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) is one of Australia’s most-important artists known for her hyper-realistic and enigmatic sculptures that depict hybrid humanoid creatures. Rendered in materials such as fibreglass, silicone and hair, her works explore the dynamics of our relationship between families and species, science and nature, art, and the environment. Captivating and endearing, her sculptures challenge audiences to question what it means to be human today.
Hadieh Shafie (b. 1969) constructs intricate designs with low-relief paper sculpture. Her compositions are reminiscent of traditional Middle Eastern art, while the artist hides hand-written and printed Farsi text within the folds of elaborate paper spirals. Both process-oriented and impossibly refined, Shafie’s skillful works are often monumental in scale, overwhelming the viewer with a visual feast of colour.