ART SG has officially returned to the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center for its third edition. Even though the number of galleries was slightly lower than last year’s fair, the aisles of the exhibitor hall were still packed with hundreds of people up until closing time of 9 p.m. for its first day for VIP visitors. Inside, dealers seemed enthusiastic.
Several galleries, like Lehmann Maupin and White Cube, reported sales by the early evening. Cardi Gallery said it sold a colored pencil work by Pablo Picasso with an asking price of $1.2 million. Still, several people told ARTnews the fires in Los Angeles and the impact on the art community were top of mind, including concerns over whether Frieze LA would still go ahead.
Art collector Agnes Lew, who is also managing director and head of private banking at East West Bank, told ARTnews that the annual West Coast art fair shouldn’t be cancelled in order to create a sense of normalcy. “Artists need to sell to sell works to carry on,” she said, while walking around the fair with Kulapat Yantrasast, a founding partner and creative director of wHY Architecture, which recently designed the renovation of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
“If they really care about the art world—it’s not a just a fake thing—then this is the moment to show up.”
Yantrasast said patrons buying from affected artists would give them a sense of confidence and dignity, not just charity. (He did note Lew was a big part of organizing the recently announced $12 million emergency fund for artists affected by the city’s fires.)
“People don’t just want handouts,” Lew said, adding that she had been sending supplies by FedEx to artists to enable production to restart. “Come on, there’s still six weeks. LA is a big place. Tell people to come to LA. Write something positive. We really, really need it.”
Back in the exposition hall, this year’s offerings at ART SG include optical illusions using Kenyan textiles, haunting photographs, layered multimedia paintings, and enigmatic marble sculptures.
Below, a look at the best booths on view at ART SG, which runs through Sunday, January 20.
-
Thandiwe Muriu at 193 Gallery
Image Credit: Karen K. Ho/ARTnews In a dazzling series of portrait photographs at Paris’s 193 Gallery, Kenyan artist Thandiwe Muriu incorporates carefully designed clothes made out of Ankara, a Dutch wax cotton fabric widely available across Africa, historical hair styles, African proverbs, and everyday objects such as baby rattles, mosquito coils, and doorstoppers, which are recycled into eyewear for Muriu’s models. The resulting “Camo” series, she told ARTnews, were inspired both by her experience of being the only woman in the country’s advertising photography industry and her living and dreaming as a modern woman in a conservative culture.
The artist will open a solo show titled “I Am Because We Are” at NYU’s Gallatin Galleries in New York on January 30.
-
Mandy El-Sayegh at Lehmann Maupin
Image Credit: Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Malaysian Chinese and Palestinian artist Mandy El-Sayegh’s powerful “Net-Grid” artworks may appear chaotic, but they are carefully layered through overpainted grids and elements of popular culture. The oil and acrylic works on linen incorporate collage, silkscreen, and hand-painted elements—including currency, advertising, and other more unusual materials, as well as references to Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, her own father’s calligraphy and the journalists killed by military vehicles in Gaza.
The artist described the approach to her three works from the “Net Grid” series as “abstract archival” and focused on the moment when the current war in Gaza began, during the same week as Frieze London in 2023. “It’s looking at time and how we read things as time goes on,” she told ARTnews.
By the close of VIP day, Lehmann Maupin said it had sold El-Sayegh’s 2024 work Net-Grid Study (Euro-Joy) for $72,000 to a collector based in Jakarta, Indonesia.
-
Antonio Santín at Marc Straus
Image Credit: Karen K. Ho/ARTnews Multiple times on VIP Day, people could not resist the urge to touch the detailed oil paintings of ornamental rugs by Antonio Santín. The Spanish artist’s largest, deeply labor-intensive optical illusion on display appears to have multiple folds and hundreds of intricately embroidered floral details. But all of it is done through oil paint, carefully applied by hand through a custom-made machine, and informed by the artist’s beginnings as a sculptor.
“We had one person at one of the art fairs come over and try picking off the fringe, because she didn’t believe me,” Livia Straus, wife of gallerist Marc Straus and co-founder of the Hudson Valley non-profit MOCA, told ARTnews. “To have that kind of finesse, that type of control—if another artist wanted to copy it, they can’t, because it’s the hand of this particular artist.”
-
Alex Seton at Sullivan+Strumpf
Image Credit: Karen K. Ho/ARTnews Unlike most artists at art fairs, Sydney-based sculptor Alex Seton wants people to touch his work. That’s because the six small puffer jackets are made from Queensland pearl marble, a material Seton grew up learning how to use because it was free and readily accessible in a local valley.
Seton told ARTnews that each of the six sculptures deals with the tension of the disposability of fast fashion, the history of marble sculpture, as well as individual stories and inspiration, including World War II RAF Bomber pilots and their oversized life jackets, Gigi Hadid’s Versace outfit at the 2022 Met Gala, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and even an old Arabic story his Egyptian mother would tell him. The artist also plans to make life-size versions of the sculptures in the future.
Gallerist Joanna Strumpf explained that Seton used the common outdoor garment as a vehicle for an idea that in contemporary society, we’re looking for ways to protect ourselves, to shield us from the world around us, from temperatures, but also from problems. “These garments should be something that is a positive thing, making us comfortable, giving us warmth, but in a lot of ways, they’re keeping us from connecting with the rest of the world,” she said.
-
Nuri Bilge Ceylan at Dirimart
Image Credit: Karen K. Ho/ARTnews It’s easy to see how Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s haunting widescreen photograph from his Turkey Cinemascope series is informed by his two years of cinema studies at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul—as well as his experience as a Palme D’Or-winning director, screenwriter, photographer and actor.
Gallery director Levent Özmen told ARTnews this portrait of two girls standing in a small lake was photographed by Ceylan in a way you can almost hear the surrounding children’s screams of joy, but while still showing the different way Turkish society treats boys and girls. “They are looking at us directly,” Özmen said. “And he also deliberately works on the lights of the faces to somehow exaggerate this unpleasant reality, but in a somehow subtle way.”
The gallery chose to include the photograph for its booth at ART SG due to Ceylan’s first Dutch solo exhibition on his award-winning films and landscape photographs opening at the Eye Museum in Amsterdam on January 17.
