ICA Miami presents “Deeper and Deeper,” the first museum solo presentation for Miami-based artist Diego Singh. The exhibition is organized across three galleries on the museum’s ground floor, and features works created over the last decade and new large-scale canvases.
The exhibition is organized by color–blue, red, and bright yellow that veers into white–and highlights the artist’s approach to the monochrome. Singh’s canvases feature intense color with color that dominates the viewers’ eye, with the effect molten, and sublime. The effect is the feeling of a saturated color that is hyperbolic, or unnatural. Singh is interested in the queer coding of color, an effort underscored by his occasional use of Martha Stewart-brand craft brushes, or a makeup airbrush gun, to render the currents in his painting.
Intensive layering is crucial to Singh’s studio practice; initial marks are lost among several coats of oil, and applied with a thin brush, creating semi-transparent veils. Singh begins by priming canvases using black or gray to provide intensity but also depth, and hyperbolic pigmentation. His networks of luminous marks aggregate to resemble skin, galaxies or topographical maps, or complex systems graphics. Frequently, the top-left quadrant of these paintings feature lasso-like marks; with sustained viewing, these resolve the stark profile of a figure in a military-style cap. While resolutely abstract, Singh’s canvases are haunted by the artist’s upbringing in Argentina, the country’s dictatorship and the “Dirty War” of 1976–1982, a period during which members of Singh’s family disappeared or went into exile. For Singh, these figures suggest both a ghost at the heart of abstraction, and a creeping authoritarianism that sends meaning into hiding.
Diego Singh (b. 1982, Salta, Argentina) was awarded the Knight Foundation Champion Award in 2019 and 2015. Singh’s work is included in the collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and Marquez Art Projects, Miami.
“Diego Singh: Deeper and Deeper” is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, and Amanda Morgan, Associate Curator.
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