Fernando Zóbel
Order is Essential
National Gallery Singapore

Born in the Philippines to a prominent Spanish family and raised in Manila and Madrid, Fernando Zóbel (1924–1984) became an artist, a patron of the arts, and a global emissary for modernism. “Fernando Zóbel: Order is Essential” at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), which featured over 200 paintings, sketches, photographs, and archival items, was Singapore’s first solo exhibition of the artist’s work. Curator Patrick Flores said that Zóbel’s creations are defined by their dynamism, abstraction, and rigor—an aesthetic reflected in the show’s subtitle, “Order is Essential”—a quote from Zóbel that underscores his exacting approach to craft.

Two key works hung just inside the entrance. Zóbel’s earliest known painting, Copy of “A Wheatfield with Cypresses” (1889) by Vincent van Gogh (1946), evinces the young painter’s early fascination with expressionism, conveyed through thick impasto that echoes the fluctuations of light and color in a landscape. Nearby was the starkly beautiful El Puente (The Bridge) (1984), Zóbel’s final painting, whose opalescent hues and hazy, shimmering effects transcend the artist’s early dalliance with representational art and mark the poignant conclusion of four decades of creative inquiry. Between these bookends sat a meticulously sketched plan for an abstract work, a reminder of the artist’s defining formal shifts and highly deliberate process.