Sundaram Tagore Singapore presents Inside Out, a group show of paintings and photographs that transcend cultural boundaries. The show includes contemporary artists of Mexican, Japanese, Israeli and North and South American origins.
All of the artists in this exhibition share a global perspective. They all live and work between cultures, which gives their work a dynamism and duality, with elements from both East and West. The diversity of content, techniques and mediums, including dry pigment, crushed minerals, steel, paper and lacquer, is a testament to the cross-cultural nature of the show, which is the gallery’s central mission.
Japanese painter Hiroshi Senju expresses modernity with ancient painting techniques unique to Japan. The New York-based artist combines pigments derived from natural materials such as minerals, seashells and coral in a medium of animal-hide glue, and then applies this paint to Japanese mulberry paper using a minimalist language rooted in Abstract Expressionism. The recently opened Hiroshi Senju Museum in Karuizawa, Japan, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Ryue Nishizawa, is home to more than one hundred works by the artist. Singapore’s OUB Centre at Raffles Place and the International Terminal at Japan’s Haneda Airport each prominently feature a mural by Senju—the latter housing his largest mural to date.
Indian-born painter Sohan Qadri, who spent much of his working life in Copenhagen, Denmark, was deeply influenced by Buddhism and the act of painting as part of meditation. His abstract, brightly colored works on heavy paper skillfully combine Tantric symbols and Western minimalism. The monochrome surfaces are covered with structural effects, created by soaking the paper in liquid and carving it in several stages while applying inks and dyes. In the process, the paper is transformed from a flat, two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional medium. Mr. Qadri’s work is included in the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts; the Rubin Museum of Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; as well as the private collections of Cirque du Soleil, Heinrich Böll and Dr. Robert Thurman.
Ricardo Mazal’s large-scale abstract paintings, inspired by his travels to Tibet’s holiest summit, Mount Kailash, explore themes of life, death, transformation and regeneration. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Mazal, who splits his time between Mexico City and Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the United States, moves between photography, digital technology and painting. The repetitive horizontal streaks of black and white and the bold quadrants of color recall the snow-streaked surfaces of the mountain but can also be read as an amalgamation of kinetic, geometric forms. Mr. Mazal’s work is included in the collections of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguerez, Zacatecas, Mexico; Maeght Foundation, Paris; and Deutsche Bank, New York and Germany.
The complete list of artists in Inside Out: Frances Barth, Edward Burtynsky, Denise Green, Stan Gregory, Nathan Slate Joseph, Ricardo Mazal, Steve McCurry, Judith Murray, Robert Polidori, Sohan Qadri, Sebastião Salgado, Hiroshi Senju, Joan Vennum, Merrill Wagner and Lee Waisler.
