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National Gallery Singapore collaborates with Centre Pompidou for modern art show in 2016

SINGAPORE — Next year, visitors to the National Gallery Singapore can expect to see works of modern art masters such as Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall rubbing shoulders with those of their South-east Asian counterparts such as Georgette Chen and Galo Ocampo in a new landmark exhibition.

National Gallery Singapore. TODAY file photo

National Gallery Singapore. TODAY file photo

SINGAPORE — Next year, visitors to the National Gallery Singapore can expect to see works of modern art masters such as Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall rubbing shoulders with those of their South-east Asian counterparts such as Georgette Chen and Galo Ocampo in a new landmark exhibition.

Scheduled to open in April next year, it will be co-curated by the museum and France’s prestigious Centre Pompidou. It will comprise more than 200 artworks, with half of these on loan from the latter. The collaboration agreement between the two institutions was signed yesterday in Paris.

“This collaboration ... will allow our art practitioners in both countries to engage and share expertise in the art,” said Sam Tan, Singapore’s Minister of State (Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry Of Culture, Community and Youth). “We hope that through this collaboration with Centre Pompidou, our two institutions will find ways to share the arts with many more people in France and Singapore.”

This exhibition, which will be the first of two annual shows slated at the National Gallery’s Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery, will run for three to four months and kick off a series of collaborations with other international art institutions and centres from Thailand, Vietnam, China, Japan and the Netherlands. These will come in the form of either new exhibitions or loans.

The collaboration with the French institution will hopefully “herald equally exciting partnerships” that go beyond simply bringing in travelling exhibitions, said National Gallery chief executive Chong Siak Ching.

The exhibition will present an overview of the development of modern art, with South-east Asia as a point of reference, said museum director Eugene Tan. It will look at the “common approaches” that modern art masters used in their respective contexts.

The collaboration with Centre Pompidou is an important one, he added, citing its status as one of the leading art museums in the world with an extensive collection.

Tan also pointed out how its recent curatorial direction has been to examine links between Western art and those from the rest of the world. In 2011, a travelling exhibition of video art from Centre Pompidou’s collection was showcased at the Singapore Art Museum. The exhibitions held at the National Gallery Singapore’s special gallery will also have a “symbiotic relationship” with its permanent Singapore and South-east Asian galleries.

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