Ikkan Art Gallery is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition Ambiguous Portrait of a Cunning Linguist (Verbal Imagery in Art), showcasing artworks that use language as a medium. These works, from a selection of international artists, concentrate on the material qualities of language - visual, aural, and beyond. Our minds work in a hybrid of visual and verbal modes, and many artists give these categories equal value - the power of a word being as important as an image. Combining words and images in inventive ways challenges audiences to rethink the interplay between visual and verbal communication.

Language as a medium offers artists the means to directly engage in an open-ended dialogue, compelling the viewer (or rather, the reader) to explore realms beyond the physical presence of an object in a gallery, whilst the complexity of language has the ability to both inform and confound us. In this exhibition, the letter, the word, a phrase, or a symbol are seen and experienced, and not necessarily read - embracing language's more permeable state: its ambiguity, its penchant for questions, subtexts and double meanings.


Artists
Ashley Bickerton
Mel Bochner
On Kawara
Glenn Ligon
Harland Miller
Lucas Samaras
Gary Simmons
John Stezaker
Lawrence Weiner

+ Young Artists
Nicola Anthony
Tom Gallant
Dawn Ng

+ Photographs from the Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive
Sergei Vasiliev


For inquiry, please contact Andrew Herdon (+65) 8316 6044 [email protected]