Materializing the Figure
[Gallery impression, Materializing the Figure, NUS Museum, Singapore, 2010]
Date: Feb - 21 April 2010
Venue: NUS Museum
Curator: Foo Su Ling
This exhibition features works by Ng Eng Teng and other sculptors. Chosen from NUS Museum’s permanent collection, they highlight aspects of sculptural interests, in particular, the human form as basis for artistic productions, and the materials involved. The figure, or the body, is articulated variously as statuaries or sculptural compositions, developed using a range of formal and conceptual devices. They may appear naturalistic in the artists’ attempts to commemorate and remember, or at other times are transformed through stylization or distortion to allude to emotive and psychological states.
Such transformations are achieved through an engagement with the nature of the medium. Materials – clay, wood, stone, bronze or iron – assume differing characteristics and resonances, and part of the sculptors’ activity is in negotiating such values for differentiated expressive aims. The varied inherent qualities of materials often shape the very manner in which conceptual aims are advanced - a (re)connection to nature can be defined through the use of wood or stone, and the urban condition and its implication to the human psyche through an assemblage of found materials. Sculptures described as ‘primitive’ and embodying humanist ideals, as well as those based on ‘constructivist’ principles and motivated by the aesthetics of planes and surfaces dynamically interlocking in space, can be seen in relation to their materiality.
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