Presented in conjunction with Singapore Art Week 2023, the exhibition Tales From an Expanding World 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. She presents possibilities of our contemporary society as complex and ambiguous through a deeply personal perspective. They imagine an idea of nature that is no longer understood as being opposed to ‘culture’, posing questions on how we define nature if it contains people rather than excluding them; and to what extent our understanding of nature as ‘other’ enables us to exploit it.
Artist Talk: 8 January 2023, 3-4pm with Tan Siuli
Venue: Yavuz Gallery, Gillman Barracks, 9 Lock Road, #02-23, Singapore 108937
When: 7 Jan - 5 Feb 2023,
By: Yavuz Gallery