A tower formed by many old radios. The building is high, while still fitting inside the room. Most of the equipment is turned on and each one emits an individual sound. This causes the viewer to be confused and overwhelmed.  

 

Still life with sheep  

A still life painting that depicts a few elements on a surface. The figure of two small sheep ornaments attracts the most attention. There are also a few fruits spread around the surface. The brushstrokes are rough and the use of color, at first sight, appears to be simple (despite a few yellow objects). 

 

Head of a woman 

Sculpture of the head (and part of the neck) of a woman. The piece looks fragmented while still coherent in its theme. In other words, the artist approaches the figure through different perspectives. 

 

Landscape of Longing  

Seven irregular and colorful pieces of work hang on the wall, each one in a unique position and having a specific shape. It looks fragmented and part of the same universe simultaneously. 

L'Osservatore Romano  

A series of collages in which the artist used headlines from a catholic newspaper followed by images such as biblical representations of hell and the Argentine military. The headlines and the images create an ironic contrast.   

 

Monument to all situations 

A small sculpture made of metal plates linked together. From a first glance, the work doesn´t seem very special. This happens, however, because the interesting part is on the artist´s ´proposal for the viewer to manipulate it.  

It is possible to organize these works through their disposition in space. There are paintings (Still life with sheep), sculptures (Babylon 2001, Head of a woman, Monument to all situations), prints (L'Osservatore Romano) and some kind of experimental interdisciplinary painting (Landscape of Longing).  

There are also a few links between the work´s themes, on a closer look. Both L'Osservatore Romano and Babylon 2001 discuss the barriers of communication, the contradictions that are inherent to this process.  Also, Head of A Woman and Monument to All Situations approach the universe of sculpture more experimentally, which implies that the viewer take an active behavior towards the work.   

There are also links within the themes of the artworks. Many of these artworks, directly or indirectly, explore themes related to identity, culture, or personal expression. Whether it's Virginia Chihota's "Fighting One’s Self," Liz Johnson Artur's "Time Don’t Run Here," or André Derain's "The Painter and his Family," these artworks touch upon aspects of personal or cultural identity.

All of these artworks are visual art pieces, representing a wide range of styles and artistic mediums. They include paintings ("Bankside - The Turbine Hall," "The Painter and his Family," "Blue Abstraction"), drawings or prints ("Fighting One’s Self"), and potentially photographs or multimedia works ("Time Don’t Run Here"). Therefore, they can be categorised under the umbrella of Modern "Visual Arts."

At first glance, A Summer’s Day appears almost as if it is alive. The painting consists of waves of colour on a white background. The streaks of yellow, purple, orange, blue and green meld together to create smooth lines that twist, bend and ripple across the canvas, horizontally, as well as an illusion of movement. While the painting is not distinctly divided into foreground, background or middle ground, the peaks and valleys or Riley’s waves, coupled with her use of colour, provide an impression of depth. The name of the painting suggests it depicts a landscape, and perhaps it does in an abstract sense. The colours and subtlety of movement elicit a sense of warmth and calm, and the visual elements work together to capture the mood and atmosphere of a summer’s day, rather than depicting it in the literal sense. 

Riley’s art was and continues to be defined by the combination of shape, colour and the creation of movement and hypnotic optical effects. While at The Royal College of Art, Riley began experimenting with impressionism, which eventually led her to pointillism. During this stage of her artistic life she primarily produced landscapes in a manner that was abstract and visually disorienting, and much of her work during the 1960s helped pioneer the OpArt movement. To A Summer’s Day was painted in 1980, using acrylic on canvas. Categorised and displayed in the section focused on colour, the description coupled with Riley's painting begins by asking: “How does colour affect the mood and atmosphere of a painting?”. According to the curator’s notes, the title is in reference to a Shakespearean sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, with the word “compare” suggesting links to the physical world, implying that the painting is Riley's interpretation or impression of a summer’s day. However, it's valuable to note that the colours of “A Summer’s Day” are not nearly as bold compared to other paintings displayed, and appear to meld together from a distance. That said, having been placed towards the far left corner of the room, right near the entrance, the painting demands attention, providing maximum impact upon closer inspection. 

There is something intense and expansive about Yves Klein’s IKB 79. The ultramarine blue, painted on canvas, seems almost unreal and in a sense, endless, as if the artist cut out a piece of the sky. The colour is the subject, and the glass that consoles it brings the audience into the world of the painting, by reflecting its surroundings through the lens of Klein’s deep blue. 

IKB 79’s sheer magnitude and simplicity give the impression of boundlessness. The name stands for “International Klein Blue”, which Klein invented in 1959. Born in 1928, he was known for his monochromatic artworks that rejected the concept that paintings needed to represent something, thus achieving a sense of creative and expressionistic freedom.  According to Klein, IKB was “a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification”, and considered the colour as having “no dimensions. [Blue] is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not”. As per the curator’s notes, Klein drew inspiration from the colour of the sky “on a beautiful sunny day in the south of France”. By developing his own shade of blue, he was able to capture the scope of the sky and “turn it into paint”. 

Klein applied the IKB on canvas using rollers to maximise the colour's incandescence. The vibrancy of the blue is jolting and remains the centre point of attention, despite the painting’s placement in the middle of the room. Wedged between Matisse and other brightly-coloured works, IKB 79 stands out, functioning as a window into the mind of the artist and the beauty and expansivity of the natural world. 

Matisse’s The Snail is a delightfully playful work of art. The piece itself nearly stretches from the gallery’s floor to the ceiling and boasts brightly coloured cutouts placed all over a white canvas, bordered by orange paper. When viewed initially, there seems to be little synergy between the roughly cut pieces of paper, painted with gouache in shades of pink, red, green and blue. However, from a distance, they take shape, creating a somewhat primitive and abstract circular form. 

It’s valuable to note that by this point in his life, Matisse found it difficult to paint, let alone work on his own, as his health was in a state of decline. The Snail was created with the aid of an assistant, who under Mattisse’s guidance, arranged the paper cutouts into the spiral shape of a snail’s shell. Colour had always been a significant part of Mattisse’s oeuvre, as he believed they “should interact with one another” otherwise, one risks creating “a cacophony”. In context to the snail, the colours used and the manner that they were placed, guide the eye around the coil of the “shell”, creating a vibrant effect. 

The painting’s reliance on bold shape and colour, as well as its abandonment of perfect lines and form, make it seem childlike in the best sense of the word. Life, much like the shape of a snail’s shell, is circular. Old age, in many ways, begins to mirror childhood, and we somehow return to the same state of freedom and simplicity experienced during youth. This sentiment permeates through Mattisse's later work and in this painting in particular. His state of play is displayed in the far right corner of the gallery room, near the exit, and the sheer size coupled with the exuberant use of colour grabs the viewer's attention. 

Andy Warhol’s Christ $9.98 (negative and positive) is an artwork comprised of two paintings, done simply using black and white acrylic and silk screen printing. The subject is a nightlight in the image of Jesus Christ, drawn simply in broad, sketchy strokes, coupled with a price tag and, quote, “ay HT”. The artwork stands alone on a bare white wall adjacent to the room’s exit. Like much of Worhal’s art, it plays with ideas of pop culture and consumerism, and in this case, the commodification of religion. 

Being a gay man and an artist at the height of the HIV/AIDs crisis, Warhol had a complicated relationship with catholicism despite being raised in the church. According to the curator's notes, his later work, including this one, explicitly tapped into catholic and religious imagery, “sometimes with a sense of irony”. The name of the painting “Christ $9.98 (negative and positive)” suggests it's an advertisement, and that religion is something that can be sold and bought. 

It’s important to note that before the ’60s, Warhol was a commercial artist. Naturally, his background in advertising, of creating art designed to sell, became part of the creative lens through which he viewed the world and even religion. The technique used to create Christ $9.98 (negative and positive), silk-screen printing, relates to the subjects of consumerism and mass production, which intrigued and inspired Worhal throughout his career. Repetition is a significant aspect of his work, and here it is used to remove the intimacy of faith and replace it with a sense of novelty: a Christ night light.

Christ $9.98 (negative and positive) belongs to a group of works called ‘Ads and Illustrations’, created by Worhal during the 1980s, at the peak of the Cold War. He returned to the newspaper adverts that influenced his early work, tracing them to create a series of severe and monochromatic black and white paintings. In the context of American politics at the time, three retrospective themes appear in these works: war, death and of course, religion.

Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation is a painting made to look like a movie poster. A woman, dressed in deep purple, looks towards the reflection of another woman in a bright green dress, her image divided across a three-way mirror. Each reflection is ever so lightly different from the other in terms of body type, facial features and physicality. Towards the bottom left of the canvas, the name of the film, “Life of Imitation”, is scrawled out in white type upon a black band. Underneath, more inscriptions in other languages (including Chinese and Tamil). 

The colours, which are jewel-toned and vibrant, as well as the name, proved reminiscent of the work of American Director Douglas Sirk, specifically, his 1959 film “Imitation of Life”.  Ming’s artwork not only appeared to draw from Sirk’s work but also the style and aesthetics of posters from the 1950s. According to the curator’s notes, Life of Imitation consisted of four “billboard” paintings created by Ming in accompaniment with his video installation of the same name. Like a traditional movie poster, each one had been painted by hand using acrylic paint on canvas.  

Wong himself cited Sirk as an inspiration. Considering that Life of Imitation (2009) recreates a pivotal scene from the original 1959 film when the character, Sarah Jane, is visited by her mother before she entirely rejects her mixed-race background to pass as white. Wong also drew inspiration from traditional Singaporean melodramas, which, much like Sirk’s “Women’s Pictures ', relied heavily on colour as a tool for storytelling. 

Wong’s poster paintings are hung in succession of one another around a single viewing room, across from Tseng Kwong Chi’s East Meets West series or the Expeditionary Portrait Series.  

‘This Could be You’ and ‘The Execution of Beloyannis’ are both based on the political theme, as both artists were mainly inspired by politic. They both portray the horror in the political world where people face death even if it’s against their will. This kind of topic leads to the work titled ‘Stag in its Glare’ which has the meaning of potential doom to humankind. The three work contain humankind theme just like ‘Fighting One’s Self’ work that portrays a womb like environment. This painting was made by Virginia Chihota who became a wife and a mother, she was inspired by the theme of a lady (fertility, pregnancy, and loneliness).