Moon paintings and fictitious flowers: Our pick of the art on show at Art SG

İnci Eviner, The Octopus and the Fur (2024), US$15,000, Dirimart

Fairgoers may recognise İnci Eviner’s work from Frieze Sculpture last year, where the Turkish artist presented a surreal set of 25 sculptures that were activated during performances in London’s Regent’s Park. Eviner works across media but her artworks often begin with multi-layered drawings that evolve into complex pieces in video, sculpture and performance. She uses elements from art history, mythology and contemporary symbols to explore topics such as gender and identity.

Eviner is one of ten contemporary artists whose works are on show at Dirimart’s booth at Art SG, which is titled Dialogues of Form and Perception and highlights “the intersections of personal, cultural and mythical narratives through diverse artistic approaches”, according to a statement. Eviner’s black-and-white, ink and silkscreen print The Octopus and the Fur (2024) depicts an octopus, a sheep and the talon of an eagle, and represents the dichotomies of predator and prey, earth and ocean. “Octopuses are an important subject of oral history studies,” Eviner tells The Art Newspaper. “Octopus and fur meet at the line where sea and land meet.”

William Turnbull, 13-1960 (1960), US$180,000, Waddington Custot

The British artist William Turnbull was connected to Singapore through his wife, the artist Kim Lim (who is the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery Singapore, until 2 February). He is best known for his sculpture, but this large-scale, two-panel oil painting shows another side of his work. “Although often pigeonholed as a sculptor, Bill explored a range of mediums, from watercolours to painting,” the artist’s son Johnny says in a recent interview on the Art SG website. “Viewing these works alongside his sculptures reveals a clear continuity and the transitions in his artistic journey.”

Turnbull once credited his time serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force as the inspiration for his painting: “The main thing about flying for me was the fact that the world didn't any longer look like a Dutch landscape; it looked like an abstract painting. You look down and you realise that so much of what one felt was true depended upon where you were standing to look at it.” The Northern industrialist and important British collector E.J. Power (1899-1993) bought 13-1960 directly from Turnbull and it was in his collection for several decades until his death. Power was a big supporter of Turnbull and of Abstract Expressionist painters.

Miya Ando, Moon Ensō (Engessō 円月相) (2024), US$85,000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery

During the pandemic, Miya Ando created 1,345 small drawings tracing each moon cycle of 29 days. They are the basis for a new installation, 29 panels of printed silk chiffon that visitors can walk through. The title, “Ensō”, means “circular form” in Japanese and represents the universe, elegance, strength and the Zen principle of no-mind.

"As you move through the panels, they become more or less transparent, echoing the moon's cycle as it waxes and wanes,” says Sundaram Tagore, the gallery’s founder. “It’s a sublime example of the artist’s ability to articulate the transient, intangible aspects of the natural world.”

Fernando Zóbel, Monstrance (1958), US$575,000, Galería Cayón

In May, the National Gallery Singapore is mounting a major retrospective on the Spanish-Filipino painter Fernando Zóbel, building on previous iterations at Madrid’s Prado Museum (2022) and the Ayala Museum in the Philippines (2024). Zóbel was a self-taught painter and while studying literature at Harvard he became friends with a number of artists connected to the Boston Expressionists. He first exhibited his work alongside them, with pieces influenced by Expressionism and Romanticism, in a group exhibition at Swetzoff Gallery in 1951. Over time he became increasingly inspired by American Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

Galería Cayón is bringing to Art SG two works by the artist from the 1950s that capture Zóbel’s transition toward abstraction. Monstrance (1958) is a recently rediscovered painting that belonged to Zóbel’s friend the artist Arturo Luz. “The work, which has been missing from the market for decades, is one of the most important works of the late 1950s,” says Adolfo Cayón, the gallery’s director. “It displays the multilinear structure so characteristic of Zóbel of these years—which, in this case, reaches such complexity that the strokes of colour are superimposed on one another, creating a sort of dense pictorial matter.”

Xin Liu, Lycorises Reverie (2023), £25,000, Gazelli Art House

To celebrate ten years of its GAZELL.iO digital residency, Gazelli Art House’s booth is dedicated to six artists exploring the intersection of digital media and emerging technologies. The Chinese artist Xin Liu, one of more than 100 artists to have taken part in the residency, is known for her melding of art and science. At Art SG, she is showing the generative work Lycorises Reverie (2023)—displayed on the booth as a two-screen video—made in collaboration with Nan Zhao. “Across the course of the animation the Lycorises—algorithmically generated flower-like forms that resemble real-world Lycoris plants crossed with fictitious organisms—constantly adapt to environments such as volcanoes, deserts and cyberspace,” says Mila Askarova, the owner and founder of Gazelli Art House. The work is a rumination on the cycle of life—both organic and artificial—and the growth, adaptation and change that accompanies it.

The London-based Gazelli Art House’s choice to bring digital art to Art SG is also a reflection of market trends. “As Singapore's art scene increasingly embraces new media and digital art, Liu’s work offers a compelling perspective on the intersection of nature, technology and the ongoing evolution of forms,” Askarova says.