Maria Farrar’s Singapore exhibition turns nourishment into a painterly language
At Ota Fine Arts in Singapore, Maria Farrar’s new solo exhibition, “Milk,” gathers nine paintings and four works on paper into a quietly charged meditation on appetite, care, and the body. The Philippines-born, London-based artist builds on the concerns of her 2023 solo exhibition “Girls being girls” in Shanghai, but the new work moves the conversation inward, toward sustenance and the emotional textures of motherhood.
Farrar said the exhibition began with an almost domestic impulse: she wanted to bake biscuits, eat them, and paint them. That instinct led her to think about painting as a sensory practice rather than a purely visual one. In her account, flavor, texture, moisture, bitterness, and sweetness all become part of the image’s logic. Food is not simply a motif in “Milk”; it is a way of thinking about what nourishes a person, physically and mentally.
A key reference for the show was Madonna del Latte (1467–69), which Farrar saw at the National Gallery. The painting’s image of the Madonna and child, and the baby’s strong face, prompted her to reflect on the nourishing force of milk. That idea surfaces in works such as I’ll Put a Trinket On (2026), where a woman preparing to go out is paired with a dog anticipating play with its friends. Farrar uses the scene to suggest that desire is not singular: each body, human or animal, seeks its own form of sustenance.
The exhibition also arrives at a personal threshold. Farrar said she will become a mother next month, and that transition sharpens the show’s attention to care, pleasure, and the persistence of the self. In her view, the carefree girl of earlier work does not disappear with age or motherhood; she must be actively nurtured. That idea gives “Milk” its emotional center, linking the pleasures of eating, making, and looking.
Food motifs recur throughout Farrar’s practice, including biscuits, berries, croissants, coffee, and pastry. She said she paints what she craves because she wants to spend more time with it, and because making something by hand offers a satisfaction similar to baking. Bread vanishes when it is eaten, she noted, while a painting remains. The exhibition suggests that this tension between ephemerality and endurance is part of what gives her work its resonance.
“Milk” is on view as a show about more than food. It is also about how artists translate private rituals into images that hold memory, desire, and change.
