Synopsis:

An Ordinary Poetry, an exhibition of new paintings by Karen Black at Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore opening 25 November – explores and celebrates the ordinariness of everyday life.

Prosaic moments are arrested in time and inspected from every angle, through shifting light and frames of mind–time here stretches and folds. Following an ankle fracture, the artist's experience of time and ordinary tasks was recomposed, altering the tempo of life's banalities. Bed became, for some time, her vantage point from which to observe the world outside as well as her internal world. Both worlds are imbedded in these works that become complete self-portraits, depicting the body in all its worldly relations.

The exhibition marks a shift in Black's oeuvre towards a more contained self-portraiture. Where her paintings have often depicted or glimpsed the self as a figure within their tableaus, here the self has an unmitigated presence. Her incantations of the psyche and theatre of the mundane is at once comic, grotesque and exceptionally delicate.

This series of fifteen new paintings presented within an installation of folded, dropping canvases, is a generous and intimate self-portrait of how it feels to live in the world as a human body, and the joy and tedium of taking care of oneself.

Opening reception : Sat, 25 November 2017, 5-7PM