Curators at the Centre Pompidou in Paris will help organise the inaugural temporary exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore, a major new institution due to launch later this year on the Southeast Asian island state.
“The aim of the exhibition is to create a dialogue between more than 100 works from the Centre Pompidou collection and a selection of about as many, gathered by the Singaporean institution around its own collection,” the organisers say. The show will compare “aesthetic practices from 1900 to the 1960s”.
The inaugural exhibition, which opens April 2016, will be co-organised by the deputy director of the Centre Pompidou’s National Museum of Modern Art, Catherine David, and its curator Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, along with Eugene Tan, the director of the National Gallery Singapore.
Works drawn from the Centre Pompidou collection include Vassily Kandinsky’s Impression V (Parc), (1911) and Obsession (1943) by Marc Chagall. Igorot Dance (1946) by Galo B. Ocampo will be among the pieces from the collection of the National Gallery Singapore.
At a memorandum signing ceremony last week in Paris, Serge Lasvignes, the newly appointed president of the Centre Pompidou, said that he welcomed this “new cultural player [Singapore] in the international scene”, adding that the move reflected the Centre Pompidou’s strategy of expanding international networks.
Asked whether more joint projects are in the pipeline with Singapore, a spokesman for the Centre Pompidou says that developments will happen “step by step”.
The Singaporean initiative is the Centre Pompidou’s latest foray into Asia; only last month, Lasvignes was in talks with Chinese officials about a number of joint projects, including temporary pop-up Pompidous at venues across China.
The new National Gallery Singapore will be housed in two historical buildings: the former City Hall and Court of Justice. Works drawn from the 10,000-strong collection of historic and Modern Southeast Asian and Singaporean art will be displayed in the new 64,000 sq. m museum.
