Fernando Zóbel
Order is Essential
National Gallery Singapore

Born in the Philippines to a prominent Spanish family and raised in Manila and Madrid, Fernando Zóbel (1924–1984) became an artist, a patron of the arts, and a global emissary for modernism. “Fernando Zóbel: Order is Essential” at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), which featured over 200 paintings, sketches, photographs, and archival items, was Singapore’s first solo exhibition of the artist’s work. Curator Patrick Flores said that Zóbel’s creations are defined by their dynamism, abstraction, and rigor—an aesthetic reflected in the show’s subtitle, “Order is Essential”—a quote from Zóbel that underscores his exacting approach to craft.

The place that the French capital holds in popular imagination as well as in art historical narratives is a formidable one, with no period in the city’s history as infamous as the first half of the 20th century. Over five years of research—and three years of curatorial work—culminated in the National Gallery Singapore’s ambitious “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s,” which approached the city’s indomitable epoch from the perspective of the Asian artists who lived, worked, and were inspired there. Variously understood as foreigners, artisans, students, and colonial subjects, they encountered the city as an arena fraught with anxiety and judgment, yet rich in opportunity and artistry.

When the Qianlong Emperor commissioned the painting
of The Blue Goats at the closing of the 1750s, he would be
marking in ink the culmination of a centuries long story which spans several dynasties and epochs. In the delicately rendered figures of these two Chinese gorals, rare creatures which dwell in the forests and mountains of the Central Asian landscape, a meditation on the nature of harmony, fragility, and power is written. The Poem of the Blue Goats, one of the Qianlong Emperor’s vast literary corpus, tells of the conquest of Xinjiang and the consolidation of the Qing Dynasty’s rule over the vast, fragmented, landscape of western China.

A cross centuries, the desire to reenact the human body has linked the learned, the mystical and the creative. From the idealised representations exemplified by the marble statuary of the classical tradition, to the modernist preoccupation with the fragmented and disintegrated body typical of Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti, and the postmodern expansion of sculpture into a range of environmental and futuristic forms, the body is the space through which we come to see and understand our own...

Plumes of stone, sand and rock bloom and coalesce into
abstract forms, a communion between the deafening force of nature, and the whisper-soft tones of the earth. Embodying the dynamic, transformational processes of nature, the sublime visual poetry of Scholar’s Rocks have inspired artists across cultures and epochs. Abstract shapes and expressive lines form billowing clouds, whilst gently sloping recesses give way to caverns and peaks of stone whose every line is infused with vibrant energy, spirituality, and meaning.

Zao Wou-Ki and Mark Rothko, 20th century masters who radically shaped and redefined the artistic landscape of the last century, throughout their careers found themselves in a foreign country, exposed to new ideas and influences away from home. Despite their disparate origins, Zao being born in Beijing in 1920, and Rothko in Latvia in 1903, both artists find a kinship across time in their deeply philosophical practices, wherein each staged some of the most moving, transcendent, and simply breath...