Johnny Abrahams, Bram Bogart, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Henrik Godsk, Erin Lawlor and Lakwena Maciver.: ART SINGAPORE

12 - 15 January 2023
Johnny Abrahams, Bram Bogart, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Henrik Godsk, Erin Lawlor and Lakwena Maciver., ART SINGAPORE
Vigo booth #1E05 | Galleries section

Vigo is pleased to present a group of works by Johnny Abrahams, Bram Bogart, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Henrik Godsk, Erin Lawlor, and Lakwena Maciver.

Art SG | Marina Bay Sands | 10 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore, 018956
Deceptively simple, the paintings of New York-based artist, Johnny Abrahams (b.1979), present a unique vocabulary of satisfying meditative yet rhythmic shapes rendered with a rich texture which plays strongly with the negative space of the raw canvas. The relationships between the symbols that are Abraham's alphabet are dependent on nothing other than themselves. There is a sense of musicality to the compositions which convey rhythm, phasing, and cadence with an unmistakable melodic character. In series, they intend to set the viewer up with both theme and variant, creating a simultaneous sense of both comfort and dissonance, hinting at a never-realised pattern.

Bram Bogart (d.2012) was a Belgian painter dedicated to exploring the materiality of paint. Like Burri and Fontana, he challenged and blurred traditional notions of painting and sculpture, building three dimensional paintings compromised mostly of natural ingredients including various oils, glue, pigment, powdered chalk, and water. His investigation into the sculptural possibilities of paint led him to use increasingly thick layers, to create nuanced textural surface, exploring balance and disorder, tension and calm, and three-dimensionality, colour, and structure.


Ibrahim El-Salahi (b.1930), born in Sudan and based now in Oxford, is widely regarded as one of the Godfathers of African modernism for his pioneering synthesis of African, Arabic and modernist visual languages and his role in the genesis of the Khartoum school. El-Salahi grew up in Omdurman, Sudan and studied at the Slade School in London. On his return to Sudan in 1957, he established a new visual vocabulary, which arose from his own pioneering integration of Sudanese, Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions.

Danish artist Henrik Godsk (b.1975) draws heavily on early modernists such as Modigliani and Picasso through depicting human figures that come from the future, but also lived in the past. Integral to his palette and striking presentation of androgynous figures that draw the eye from afar, are his inherited traveller aesthetics which were cemented as a young man painting the fun fair rides he grew up around as a seventh-generation traveller. His work takes on an extra dimension when one considers that these functional decorations were always constrained within the physicality and functionality of the objects used to attract and entice the customer to take the rides or visit the fairs.

Erin Lawlor (b.1969), a British artist based in London, utilises a wet on wet oil painting method building layers of enveloping brushstrokes that cascade and dance within the canvas making abstracted reference to the Baroque. 


Lakwena Maciver (b.1986), London born and based, creates painted prayers and meditations which respond to and re-appropriate elements of popular culture. Exploring the role of the artist as mythmaker, with their use of acid-bright colour and bold typographic text, her paintings act as a means of decolonisation, subtly subverting prevailing mythologies. Her approach is instinctive and autodidactic, producing visceral, rhythmic and immersive panel paintings, iconic murals, and installations. She has created works in the public realm internationally, from installations at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Yorkshire Sculpture Park to a juvenile detention centre in Arkansas, a monastery in Vienna, and the Bowery Wall in New York.
Back to Past exhibitions