Largest solo exhibition of Genevieve Chua works opens at STPI Gallery

A new show by Singaporean painter Genevieve Chua opens at STPI from the 22nd of February, 2020, featuring the largest exhibition of the artist's works to date.

Recognised for her abstract approach to painting, Chua has been tapped as one of the most promising artists from Singapore in the last decade. Her use of geometric shapes and a monochromatic palette create complex, intricate works with patterns that evoke qualities of near-abstraction and optical art. An element of awareness in her practice adds playfulness to her exploration of visual perception and how the viewer interacts with her works.

 

Chua’s new exhibition “Twofold” centres on Chua’s idea of painting as a medium occupying “two-and-a-half dimensions”, the show features playful configurations of paintings from Chua’s ongoing series Edge Control, Swivels and After the Flood as well as new print-based works from her residency with STPI in 2019. It is the largest solo exhibition of the artist’s work to date.

Edge Control is a series of paintings the artist began in 2017, when she was pursuing her MA from the Royal College of Arts, London. It uses a hard-edge, monochromatic language that links the unique shape and content of each painting.

Also included in the exhibition are works from After the Flood, an ongoing series from the last decade of hand-painted, photographic prints of forests in Singapore, situated on the fringes of urban developments in the city-state. Their contemplative tone provides further points of reference for the exhibition’s exploration of visual perception.

For her residency at STPI, Chua continued to use the clean, geometric shapes and patterns found in Edge Control while creating each piece with a sense of depth and the addition of colour. The artist produced seven distinct pieces of work with the STPI Creative Workshop team, working with and combining several printmaking techniques including screenprinting on acrylic, relief printing on paper and three- dimensional acrylic wall pieces, to create works that employ optically deceptive imagery, such as the moiré pattern.

“Twofold” is the artist’s exploration of fundamental questions of painting, particularly its perception and constituent materials. It arises not only from ideas of human vision and simulation, but experiences of interpretation which unfold over time.

“Twofold” is guest-curated by Melanie Pocock, Curator at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK. The exhibition runs from Saturday 22 February to 24 April 2020 at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery in Singapore.

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Genevieve Chua (born 1984, Singapore) is a painter who works primarily through abstraction. Her works explore structures and processes of painting through the use of diagram, palimpsest, syntax and the glitch. While notions of nature and wilderness persist across several works, the form taken by her exhibitions – image, text or object – is disrupted through painting.

STPI is a creative workshop and contemporary art gallery based in Singapore. Established in 2002, STPI is committed to promoting artistic experimentation in the mediums of print and paper, making it one of the most cutting-edge destinations for contemporary art in Asia. STPI sits alongside National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum as part of the national Visual Arts Cluster of leading institutions in the region.