STPI is delighted to present Paper – Sight, the first solo exhibition in Singapore by Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake this September. While his wide oeuvre encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, large-scale assemblage pieces, and experimental music and videos, it is his collage of found objects, images and scraps from discarded urban culture and mass media that is most characteristic of his artistic expression. Ohtake’s employment of print methods and materials at STPI defied convention, translating this visual language into exceptional works including a full scrapbook and large-scale paper pulp paintings that echo recurring motifs of forest/nature, scrapbooks/daily life and neon colours. This unapologetic body of work emanates Ohtake’s preoccupation with a sense of life’s transience, capturing the very density of the layers of time and its experience.
Highlights include a series of large-scale fluorescent paper pulp paintings as well as a 320-page sculptural scrapbook, consisting of 160 individual artworks, that parallel his ongoing Scrapbook series of 68 artist book spanning over nearly four decades. They speak of memories and archaelogy through assemblage of objects that are as much sculptures as they are artefacts. An extensive presentation of these Scrapbooks was shown at the 2013 Venice Biennale, as part of the ‘Encyclopaedic Palace.’ Ohtake’s work is in numerous public and private collections including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Benesse House, Naoshima; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
The exhibition will run from 25 September to 5 November 2016 with guided tours every Tuesday (11.30 am), Thursday (11.30 am) and Saturday (2.30 pm).
