Art

“There’s a myth that serious structure and rational thought are true. The prison of rules. It’s limiting and false, and the thing I love about Surrealism is that sense of pulling the rug, letting the Other come into play – that sense of shaking the cage of reality.”

The second brainchild of co-directors Carolyn Craig and Damian Dillon, Syrup is a commercial gallery and art space representing a stable of artists from Australia and South East Asia. The duo’s inaugural gallery, Schmick Contemporary, was a studio-sized room in a dilapidated three-storey boarding house in the grungiest part of Sydney’s Chinatown district. Schmick was founded as an artist-run initiative to create spaces for emerging talents to exhibit their work in response to the significant number of gallery closures across Sydney during the pandemic.

Polish-born Australian artist Izabela Pluta works within the expanded field of photography to enact processes of record-making and translating that re-imagine the role performed by images in a broader social context. Her next solo exhibition, 'Image after Image', opens in May at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in Paddington, Sydney.

As Singapore emerged from the privations of World War II and transitioned into independence, it was said that the arts were a luxury the new republic could scarcely afford. Of course, it’s never been easy to make a living as an artist. But in the all-business environment of mid-century Singapore, earning a living daubing oil on canvas was especially challenging.

“Try it. Take a work of art off the wall, out of your room. You’ll feel the hole, that something is missing, an emptiness, and it’s unsettling,” say Valter Spano, director at Partners & Mucciaccia Gallery. “Art becomes a part of you. Sometimes you only really feel that when it’s not there, when there’s a hole, like when you move house and it feels empty until the art goes up.”

“I’m not into minimalism,” says Anna Layard. As an art historian, consultant and founder of Layard Interiors, it would be almost criminal if she were to pare back the artefacts, paintings and sculptures in her home.

A sense of serenity descends on entering Ode to Art gallery – a stark difference from the action of Raffles City. The canvases and eclectic mixed media are in sharp relief against the neutral walls, and showcase a largely Asian collection by the likes of Lim Tze Peng and Hong Zhu An. “I always feel great pride in our local art scene,” says owner / founder Jazz Chong, “and take great pleasure in seeing more local artists being collected.”

At the forefront of contemporary art practice in Australia, The Commercial gallery has turned its back on the modernist white cube in favour of a polished, industrial-grey feel. Founder Amanda Rowell has hand-selected her gallery stable, featuring artists who exemplify the panache of modernity, the rawness and brutality of punk, the refined graces of minimalism, and the evocative provocations of post-conceptual practice. Rowell continues to invite emerging and experimental artists to exhibit alongside more established ones, giving the exhibition programme a timeless edge that straddles the best of all art forms.

James Tylor's current touring exhibition, ‘Turrangka... In the Shadows’ presents a survey of the past decade of his practice exploring his Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Maori (Te Arawa) and European heritage. Featuring five exhibition rooms, the survey opens with a body of expanded photographic work, sculptural and culturally significant objects, and designs Tylor developed over a two-year journey along the 300km Hans Heyson trail through the Lofty Mountains and Flinders Rangers.

Established in 2004, China Heights was founded on an organic ethos of ‘sub-culture making’. As is often the case with taste-makers, what has now become one of the most innovative cross-form galleries in Australia began as a young art and design oriented group of peers riffing creatively in a warehouse.

Artist Annalisa Ferraris says growing up in the historically significant Sydney suburb of Castlecrag, her interest in architecture was piqued early. “My grandparents lived nearby — typical Italian family — and when I would walk through the streets with my Nonna when I was little, I just loved all of those signature Walter Burley Griffin flat-roofed houses,” she recalls. 

The newly launched Whitestone Gallery in Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark is immediately striking in its polished concrete floors, bare white walls, raw ceilings and sculptural lobby designed by renowned architect Kengo Kuma.

Now in its seventh consecutive year, the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair is a staple in the art calendar – and one of the biggest economic drivers in the Asia-Pacific art market.

Picasso once pronounced that art washes the dust of everyday life off the soul. It also effortlessly sweeps the bland off our walls.