Haridas Contemporary is excited to announce Malaysian artist Minstrel Kuik (b. 1976) first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will be held at its space at Tanjong Pagar Distripark on 20 Sep 2025, 5 – 8 pm.

Kuik presents a new body of work comprising of eight paintings and four fabric-based installations, which develop almost three decades of an artistic career spanning photography, painting, drawing, and installation. As extended meditations on process and methodology, these works highlight Kuik’s deep examination of the artistic process, something tantamount to a phenomenology of artmaking.

The paintings of still-life arrangements incorporate elements of previous photographic works and studies, to which Kuik further incorporates found objects from the artist’s studio. Illusionistic in effect, the paintings are the result of Kuik’s attempts to observe, internalise, translate, and manifest the visible world through her own interior landscapes. For Kuik, these are exercises in perception and sensorial coordination; they activate the play of subjectivities and perceptions that the artist organises, consciously and unconsciously, in the moment of artmaking.

These investigations of what might be called the Gestalt in the workings of the artistic consciousness also inform the series of fabric installations presented here. Suspended from horizontal rods, the installations expand on Kuik’s broad approaches to painting and sculpture, turning ready-to-wear garments and other textile scraps into assemblages that transpose and translate materiality into figuration, and figuration into political, gendered, corporeal subjects. The recurrent motif of the leopard stalks these works with its associations of rebellion, desire, and instinct; for Kuik, these are aspects of a collective unconscious that drive artistic decisions and form the basis of artmaking as a risk-taking enterprise.

Haridas Contemporary is excited to announce Melissa Tan’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. The show features fifteen new works by Melissa, continuing her exploration of goddesses and their chapters in mythology. Each work posits a scene unfolding around an earth-bound goddess. Featuring seven wall-bound works and eight free-standing sculptures, each intricate piece portrays a goddess shielding herself with a resilience in overcoming and accepting insurmountable circumstances.

Re-interpreting the works alongside Melissa’s installations, writer Euginia Tan provides eight inspired poems encapsulating the shields and triumphs against the labyrinthine nature of past and present obstacles. An immersive blend of art and text, Of Labyrinths & Shields pays tribute to a feminist, mythical landscape of higher beings fixated and burdened by earthly desires.

Haridas Contemporary is thrilled to announce its inaugural group exhibition, featuring new and existing works from seven Singapore-based artists: Esmond Loh (b. 1995), Gerald Tay (b. 1992), Jeremy Sharma (b. 1977), John Marie Andrada (b. 2001), Lyle Buencamino (b. 1978), Melissa Tan (b. 1989), and Oscar Xyh (b. 1999).

Ranging from paintings, wall-sculptures, and video work, the group show offers a preview of the gallery’s programming for 2023/24.

An opening reception will be held at the gallery on 16 Sep 2023, 4 – 7 pm. All exhibiting artists will be present.