Rita Targui of STPI Gallery Curates Affordable Art for First Time Art Collectors - Men's Folio
Lifestyle, Arts & Culture

Rita Targui of STPI Gallery Curates Affordable Art for First Time Art Collectors

  • By Manfred Lu

Rita Targui of STPI Gallery Curates Affordable Art for First Time Art Collectors
For the month of December and January 2021, you might notice that we have changed the way we are presenting things on our site. While we could have taken the easy way out and presented generic festive stories with generic festive ideas — top 10 shoes to party in, the best log cakes that are available for delivery and festive hampers to gift friends and family — at Men’s Folio, we believe in ideas that are as functional as they are frivolous, as smart as they are easy to wing and as enriching to you as they will be to the people around you. In short, we want to be as useful as possible because #aintnobodygottime.

Hence, we’ll be presenting 60 very useful ideas for the festive season and into the 365 days to come for the next 60 days. Here is idea 14: Rita Targui of STPI Gallery curates some affordable art for first time art collectors.

Curated by STPI Gallery Director, Rita Targui, these affordable art by four artists are ideal for first time art collectors or connoisseurs alike.



JASON MARTIN, “PURE MAGENTA III”, 2018, INDIVIDUALLY HAND-SPRAYED AND CAST STPI HANDMADE PAPER, EDITION 3 OF 6, FRAMED: 94 X 80 X 8 CM
British artist Jason Martin demonstrates his distinct treatment of colour in his series of paper castings. The use of concentrated pigments on paper, combined with media moulded by hand gives rise to different behaviours in volume and form.

The historically-rooted monochrome is reinvigorated through Martin’s manipulation of material as a kind of sculpture within the language of painting, where the line between pictorial object and support structure seems to collapse.


Rita Targui of STPI Gallery Curates Affordable Art for First Time Art Collectors

HEMAN CHONG, “BATTLE ROYALE”, 2006, SCREENPRINT ON PAPER, 100 X 70 CM, EDITION OF 15
Heman Chong is an artist whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations and writing. His practice can be read as an imagination, interrogation and sometimes intervention into infrastructure as an everyday medium of politics.

In his body of work on view, Heman Chong’s transposes a series of film noir titles and geometric images onto paper, creating works that are reminiscent of Hard-Edge, Minimal and Op Art. The series deal with the central concept of totalitarianism, whereby bureaucracy imposed on individual lives leads to untenable situations.



AARON CURRY, “GRID-TRIP 3”, 2018, SCREENPRINT ON DIBOND WRAPPED WITH STPI HANDMADE MIXED COTTON AND ABACA PAPER, 115 X 152 X 13 CM
Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Curry’s practice oscillates between the mediums of painting and sculpture. His works challenge the divisions that isolate one medium from another to reveal a richness in the middle ground.

Curry’s works possess a distinctively bold and intensely saturated two- dimensional quality and reference a wide range of artistic styles — from the bright colours of Pop Art and the distorted planes of Cubism to the biomorphism of Surrealism.


Rita Targui of STPI Gallery Curates Affordable Art for First Time Art Collectors
TOBIAS REHBERGER, “FREE SPEECH”, 2016, SCREENPRINT ON COLORED PRESSED PAPER PULP, 76 X 102 CM, EDITION OF 4, 3 AP
These typography-based screenprints draw attention to the artist’s sensitive use of composition and colour. Its deceptively simple appearance involves a highly intricate process which relies on precise registration and colour-mixing.

Employing wordplay, stripped-down typography and a vibrant palette, Tobias Rehberger’s “Free” series explores intriguing dichotomies in the English lexicon.

Hence, we’ll be presenting 60 very useful ideas for the festive season and into the 365 days to come for the next 60 days. Here is idea 14: Rita Targui of STPI Gallery curates some affordable art for first time art collectors.

This story about affordable art for first time art collectors are curated by STPI Gallery Director, Rita Targui first appeared in the December/January 2020 issue of Men’s Folio Singapore.