Each year for their Exhibition Cycle, Aloft at Hermès welcomes original, specially conceived works by contemporary artists. Following on from Noriko Ambe’s exhibition, the curator of the space, Emi Eu, has oriented the programming towards a new thematic area: materiality. It is a theme that the two young artists exhibiting at Aloft in 2018, Jeremy Sharma and French graphic designer Xavier Antin, have embraced and freely interpreted.
Xavier Antin is a French graphic designer reinventing his art by merging the traditional practices with his plastic researches, using digital technologies.
For his exhibition at Aloft, Xavier Antin is inspired by the city state of Singapore, from the lush, tropical vegetation of its parks and gardens to its powerful financial and banking industries. His exhibition Vanishing Workflows features a suspended landscape of floral textiles, printed using a mixture of manual and digital techniques.
Fans incorporated into a sculptural structure provide a light breeze that traverses the space and brings the material to life. Connected to an online bitcoin trading platform, the sculpture is programmed to order a bouquet of flowers to the exhibition space every time it makes a profit.
Employing the timeless, symbolic representation of flowers and nature, vanity and life, Vanishing Workflows brings together the polarised worlds of artisanal craftsmanship and digitisation in an acute reflection of Singapore, a singular city with abundant nature spread across its numerous landscaped gardens and a thriving technological and finance industry.
Exploring the rich tensions between technology and nature, the visible and the hidden, the tradition of vanitas paintings and the contemporary human condition, Xavier Antin here revisits the ancestral theme of floral representation.
Xavier Antin will present his work in more details during a talk taking place on Friday, 14 December at 3pm.
Venue : Aloft at Hermès, 541 Orchard Road, 4/F Liat Towers.
Admission : Free
Open daily 10.30am – 8pm daily
