With its title borrowed from a series of prints created in 1978 by Anni Albers, now residing in the Singapore Art Museum’s Tyler Collection, Second Movement pulls focus away from the reproducible, two-dimensionality associated with traditional prints. Instead, it shines a collective light to conceptual and unconventional pieces produced by artists who had spent time in-residence at the STPI workshop. Pushing the technical and philosophical edge of printmaking, these largely three-dimensional, spatial and contemporaneous artworks in Second Movement offer snapshots to the fuller, typically complex, and critically acclaimed practice of each artist.

In Second Movement, print does not necessarily equal paper. Where and when an impression is transferred, by striking, pressing or stenciling, a substrate becomes a print. Artists have engaged print with metals, wood, plastic, fabric and stone, both as an end and as a means. The piece by Haegue Yang for example, features pressed vegetables bought from NTUC Finest. Artists Zul Mahmod and Teppei Kaneuji are represented with works made principally with acrylic sheets while Rirkrit Tiravanija etches on stainless steel.

If one were to observe the output of works produced at STPI, its resident artists’ enduring openness and relentless appetite for experimentation would emerge as a consistent and traceable theme. It is as if print gave them a second life or parallel universe from the routine of their otherwise established art practice. Braced by the knowledge and skills of its in-house master printers, STPI continue to provide a precious and now increasingly rare platform for the production of high-quality artworks conceptualised on-site and in-residence.

Second Movement therefore proposes a reevaluation not only of print, but of our lenses of perception. Printing is one amongst the most primal human methods of expressions, it is bona fide. The thumb print, also largely ‘stamped’ onto digital scanners today, is still a print. In an age where continual disruptions are the orders of our days, print as the philosophical ‘second movement’ is not to be underestimated.

Throughout its run, this Annual Special Exhibition at STPI will be supported by a diverse array of public programmes including tours, workshops, performances, film screenings and panel discussions. The Annual Special Exhibitions at STPI Gallery gives audiences in Southeast Asia and Singapore the rare opportunity to encounter a remarkable scope of works on paper created by the most significant artists of modern and contemporary art history. Previous Annual Special Exhibitions have included Takashi Murakami: From Superflat to Bubblewrap (2019), David Hockney: A Matter of Perspective (2017), Zao Wou-Ki: No Boundaries (2016), and The Mystery of Picasso’s Creative Process: The Art of Printmaking (2013).