WOAW Gallery is proud to present A Quiet Room, A Place In Your Heart, a group show featuring 23 works by 9 international artists in the gallery’s Singapore space, from May 4 - June 1, 2024. Featured artists include Daniel Fleur, Duri Baek, Elena Rivera-Montanes, Karel Dicker, Marian Ang, Miho Ichise, Mizuki Nishiyama, Nina Silverberg and Novo.
A Quiet Room, A Place in Your Heart is an exploration of the intimate spaces that hold significance in our lives, whether they are real, materialised from memory, or imagined. Through various stylistic and compositional approaches, and a spectrum of interpretations to the title of the show, the works in this exhibition create a new dialogue on the role of the artist's psyche in contemporary painting.
What unites these diverse works is a shared sense of yearning — for a place of quiet to contemplate, express, reflect, and celebrate the personal and the every day, the mundane and the dramatic alike. The purpose of capturing these intimate places in paint goes beyond mere representation, it is a means of elevating and imbuing each scene with narrative depth, transforming the way we see and think about these comfort spaces — a place in our hearts.
The work of the Sweden-based artist Daniel Fleur (b. 1992, Democratic Republic of the Congo) centers around the pleasures and pressures of modern living, and hints at how matters of the heart can be interpreted extremely differently for different people and purposes at this point in contemporary society.
Korean artist Duri Baek (b. 1984, Korea) tells of the will to live through light and darkness, and explores the coexistence of elements with opposite qualities.
The work of the British artist Elena Rivera-Montanes (b. 1998, Frimley, England) floats between past and present, commemorating moments and people in her life through belongings once owned and spaces once inhabited, evoking a sense of familiarity most can respond to.
Dutch artist Karel Dicker (b. 1989, Schimmert, Netherland)’s “drawn poems” feature no living figure, but remains - remains of moments lived and unlived, alone or in company. The expressionistic tableaus are bursting with wild longing to celebrate the better things in life, missing are the people trapped in the restricting society of their own creation, endlessly longing for freedom, love and celebration.
The Hong Kong-based Marian Ang (b. 1987, London, England) builds on her series “A Room of One’s Own”, named after the 1929 essay by the English writer Virginia Woolf, which takes inspiration from spaces that great women artists carved out for themselves, reflecting the dichotomy between her domestic and working spheres.
The Japanese artist Miho Ichise (b. 1969, Japan) celebrates the everyday with her practice, capturing quiet, fleeting moments that would otherwise be missed, with light playing a narrative role in its own right.
Exploring ideas of purity, femininity, Shintoism, and trauma; the London-based artist Mizuki Nishiyama (b. 1998, Hong Kong) utilises the elements of the world to responds to what it means to be a woman today. Creating - a chaotic yet meditative process - allows her to make sense of the more tempestuous periods in life as well as merge interdisciplinary thoughts and mediums to visualise the contemporary experience.
Following a prolonged period of illness in her early adulthood, the London-based painter Nina Silverberg (b. 1994, Rome, Italy)’s subjects frequently include timeless signifiers of human care and comfort - with silhouetted structures acting as architectural archetypes of the Mediterranean home, serving as protection. At once melancholic and reassuring, they suggest an inherent frailty and offer empowerment as coping mechanisms against our contemporary condition.
The Korean artist Novo (b. 1982, Korea) pushes the boundaries of traditional still life painting by adopting different planar perspectives and altering observed colours and shapes of objects and interiors. This new form of figurative painting reflects the curiosities and pleasantries of daily life.