SINGAPORE.- Gagosian announced the gallery’s participation in the inaugural edition of Art SG, with a selection of works by international contemporary artists including Banksy, Georg Baselitz, Ashley Bickerton, Edmund de Waal, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Thomas Houseago, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Jia Aili, Harmony Korine, Takashi Murakami, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Penone, Ed Ruscha, Spencer Sweeney, Sarah Sze, Tatiana Trouvé, Anna Weyant, Jonas Wood, and Zeng Fanzhi.

The presentation features two works by Ashley Bickerton, who passed away in November 2022. Seascape: Floating Ocean Chunk No. 1 (2017) and 6°50'03.0"S 121°06'55.0"E (2022) belong to Bickerton’s Ocean Chunk series of wall-mounted sculptures. These translucent resin blocks, embedded with fabricated formations of sand, rock, and coral, evoke the artist’s love of the sea. Bickerton first conceived the series in New York during the winter of 1992, just before his permanent relocation to the Indonesian island of Bali. The sculptures reflect not only his tropical roots, but also his surfing experience. Acknowledging the entanglement of nature and technology, they signal humanity’s exploitation of natural resources.

In his characteristically mordant gilt-framed painting Guantanamo (2006), from the series Crude Oils, Banksy depicts a figure wearing the orange jumpsuit of a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay detention camp, his wrists bound together and a hood covering his head as he crouches on a sunlit beach. Tetsuya Ishida’s surreal painting Untitled (1995) depicts a man curled up in the fetal position before a television set, a border of numbers and other information lending the composition the appearance of an ultrasound display. Zeng Fanzhi’s tangled landscape Untitled (2017) and abstracted skull image Untitled (2020) extend the artist’s visual exploration of Taoist insights into the transience of human life and endeavor in the context of a boundless natural world.