Galerie Steph presents Donia Kaiser's first solo exhibition in Singapore. Her delicate miniature paintings of gouache on wasli paper were recently seen in SPOT ART 2013, a juried art festival for exceptional artists under 30 in Asia. Her paintings, though small and intimate, contain minute painstaking details marking her rigourous skill and demanding technique. Somewhere or Other will feature all new works.

Kaiser's images vacillate between the dark and the hopeful. Her current body of work presents snippets of the presumed city of Lahore, the artist's home. The coarse urban life with its theatre and drama are depicted through the intense lurid colours of the subjects against a disquieting dark backdrop, accenutating the physical and emotional strife of the dispossessed and dislocated. Kaiser explains Somewhere or Other is an extension of her previous body of work The Other Side, about the indigent, the invisible and their stature in society. Her new work touches on their existence in the physical world and divine reality.

Many of her paintings take two to three months to complete, and in the tradition of the old masters, she works by building up many layers of gouache on wasli paper. But whereas most miniature work has a flat two-dimensional feel, hers has a three-dimensional effect brought on by her own technique that allows her to render even the most miniscule of details, from frown lines on faces to creases on clothes. She took eight weeks to make a single miniature work that measured 19 cm by 19 cm and worked for 14 to 16 hours a day because, in her words, “that is what my technique requires”.

-Galerie Steph

Image: © Donia Kaiser
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Steph