Yavuz Gallery is proud to announce internationally acclaimed Australian-artist Patricia Piccinini in Tales From an Expanding World. Presented in conjunction with Singapore Art Week 2023, the exhibition marks Piccinini’s first commercial solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, and is held in parallel with the artist’s ongoing institutional retrospective, Patricia Piccinini: We Are Connected at ArtScience Museum, Singapore.
Piccinini is one of Australia’s most important artists who has represented the country at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Her practice resides in the complex sphere of the real and hyperreal, the factual and speculative, and is mindfully engaged with a wide range of ideas from concepts of the uncanny to the advent of the cyborg, biopolitics and posthumanism. Based on a deep curiosity for the natural world, Piccinini’s wonder situates her practice at the frontier of some of the most pressing issues of the 21st century.
Renowned for her enigmatic sculptures that depict hybrid humanoid creatures, Piccinini has challenged frontiers of the hyperrealist tradition in sculpture. Working across an array of materials such as silicone, fibreglass and human hair, she creates surreal beings based upon genetic science developments and historical studies. Creatures with soulful brown eyes and long ears, scales, or webbed extremities, appear simultaneously captivating and endearing. Central to Piccinini’s practice are the dynamics between families and species, science and nature, art and the environment. Charting a terrain in which scientific progress and ethical questions are intertwined, her works challenge audiences to question our relationship with the natural world, and ultimately what it means to be human today.
Tales From an Expanding World continues Piccinini’s exploration of the issues, concerns and possibilities inherent in contemporary life through recent major sculptures and wall works.
As the artist states:
At a moment when it is possible to be overwhelmed by things that we are losing, by the fears of species lost and biodiversity compromised, I think it is important to believe that the future still holds the possibility for positive change. That is the expanding world that I imagine with these works, a world adjacent to ours, impossible but possible to imagine.
This is also the expanding world that is opened up by technological breakthroughs like CRISPR, which threatens to allow the mutants of my imagination to become viable. I wonder how we feel about the new possibilities that such a world allows, and what we think about the ethics of this new world that we are creating.