Singapore Art Week 2025: Must-Visit Galleries in Singapore
From 17 to 26 January 2025, Singapore Art Week will celebrate the visual arts with a citywide program of events and activations presented by Singaporean museums and galleries. Read on to see what local galleries and museums have planned for the most exciting week of art in Singapore.
Share this article:
Gillman Barracks is a group of conserved colonial barracks and home to a number of well-established galleries, forming one of the main nuclei in Singapore for contemporary art. Amidst the rustic charm and lush greenery, Sundaram Tagore will bring together the new and recent works of eight notable Southeast Asian female artists with an exhibition titled Disobedient Bodies: Reclaiming Her. Working across a range of mediums, the artists deconstruct rigid ideologies related to race, identity, tradition and sexuality. Richard Koh Fine Art will hold the first solo exhibition by the Burmese artist duo Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu. The Squares features a new series from the artists’ ongoing project, Thousand Pieces of White (begun in 2009), a reflective body of work that delves into three decades of personal and political history in Myanmar.
Yeo Workshop will present new artworks by Fyerool Darma titled krØmæ§piritⱫ, which combines found industrial materials with stock photos—pre-existing, commercially available images—and generative images, which are created through algorithms or AI processes. The Columns Gallery will present the first solo exhibition of Shourouk Rhaiem in Singapore, Memory and Metamorphosis, which invites audiences to witness the alchemy of transforming mundane objects into extraordinary creations. Ota Fine Arts will hold a group exhibition titled In Dialogue, featuring an array of artists, including Yayoi Kusama and Atreyu Moniaga, reflecting the diversity of expressions of contemporary art today.
FOST Gallery presents A CUBE IS A CUBE IS A CUBE, an interdisciplinary exhibition where artist Grace Tan explores dimensionality in flux through the cube, a three-dimensional object bounded by six congruent square faces, challenging our preconceived notions of stability and solidity. Be sure to also pop into Ames Yavuz, who will be presenting ‘a gesture, a room, a memory’, an exhibition where contemporary artists contemplate the domestic, the everyday, and the small epiphanies of the moments in-between.
Over at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, an industrial building consisting of storage spaces to serve the port, there is a collection of art galleries and the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). SAM is holding 3 exhibitions, Yee I-Lann: Mansau-Ansau, Pratchaya Phinthong: No Patents on Ideas and Seeing Forest by Robert Zhao Renhui, which was presented at the Singapore Pavillion at the Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice. Seeing Forest accumulates and condenses a decade of Robert Zhao’s observations on secondary forests in Singapore and the new ecosystems that have developed within it, revealing the evolution of Singapore and the ways in which human urban design can shape the natural world and vice versa.
Whitestone Gallery will present GUTAI: Beyond The Canvas, an exhibition featuring the iconic works of Japanese artists that are part of the Gutai Art Movement. Gajah Gallery will hold a group exhibition titled Big Bang: A Myth of Origins, where participating artists reflect on the universal act of creation—not merely as a divine or cosmic event but as an intrinsically human endeavour—through their diverse practices.
In the Civic District of Singapore, which is home to some of the country’s most historically important landmarks, the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) oversees the world’s largest public collection of Singaporean and Southeast Asian art and is housed in the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings, making it the largest museum in Singapore. NGS presents Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective – the most comprehensive museum survey to date of Singapore-born British artist Kim Lim’s work. This landmark exhibition is organised into four thematic and periodic sections, each highlighting Lim’s predominant aesthetic preoccupations of the time. This is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the Singapore-born British artist, which traces the evolution of her practice over four decades with never-before-seen photographs and archival materials, allowing visitors to take a deeper look into her artistic journey, philosophy and creative relationships.
Located a couple of streets behind NGS, Prestige Art Gallery will bring together the works of five acclaimed Singapore artists, Han Sai Por, Koh Nguang How, Lee Wen, Tang Da Wu, and Vincent Leow, for an exhibition titled Rust: Echoes of Memory. This interdisciplinary exhibition engages with themes of temporality, decay, and regeneration, revealing how personal and collective histories emerge in art to reflect every day. Ode to Art, a local gallery representing an international spectrum of artists with diverse collections across several mediums, and artcommune gallery, which represents the most important artists in the Singapore visual art canon, are also conveniently located within walking distance of NGS.
Just a stone’s throw away from the Civic District is the Bras Basah. Bugis precinct, Singapore’s arts and heritage district and one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Singapore. Cuturi Gallery will present Tea Time, a new series of paintings by French artist Gaël Davrinche, which invites viewers to pause, linger, and engage his works with fresh eyes, journeying beyond the surface of the visible. For Davrinche, the true essence of his art lies not in the immediate apparent but in the quiet revelations that emerge through time and contemplation. Haridas Contemporary presents Another Day in Paradise by Esmond Loh, a vibrant confluence of Esmond Loh’s artistic evolution, offering a glimpse into his visions of a parallel reality that combines fragments of memory and imagination.
If you find yourself wandering Orchard Road, Singapore’s iconic upscale shopping belt, be sure to drop by Tang Contemporary Art and STPI Creative Workshop and Gallery, who will be presenting the first solo exhibition of esteemed artist Suzann Victor, the only Singaporean female representative at the national pavilion since its inaugural participation in the Venice Biennale (2001). iPRECIATION, will be presenting a solo exhibition by Li Xianting, a key figure in the development of Chinese avant-garde art and a highly respected independent art critic and curator, often referred to as the “Godfather of Chinese Contemporary Avant-Garde Art.”
Australian gallery Sullivan + Strumpf will be collaborating with Appetite, a multi-concept space a shophouse in the central business district, to present Shapeshifters. This exhibition brings together a selection of works from the Australian gallery’s roster of artists that centre on notions of fluidity and hybridity. This dynamic exhibition will amplify a cross-cultural dialogue between Australia and Singapore and celebrate diverse modes of creative expression. Other notable galleries worth visiting include Bol Gallery, Highlight Art and ART SEASONS.
Share this article:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email
WhatsApp