Embracing a rich legacy to Modernist thought Benjamin Swaim paintings preserve the serene with simple gestures in bold and bright hues. His melancholic sense of comprehending the world unfolds in a series of oil renderings centring is a unique, idiosyncratic figure in a landscape, or an event alluring to the notion that something has taken place, or is about to happen. These actions, memories and particular moments are suspended in time. They embody a sense of the unknown, an absence of narrative and a quiet presence. 

Extended version in catalogue. Available here.. 

In his career that has spanned five decades with major paintings acquired in prestigious public institutional collections like National Gallery of Scotland and National Gallery of Australia and other major private benefactors like Kerry Stokes Collection and Janet Holmes e Court Collection, Kirwan-Ward ́s oeuvre is primarily interested in evoking a sense of metaphorical light through non-representational painting.

Segmentary Bodies is a new body of work by Australian artist David Keating which explores how human bodies are coded, by a myriad of forces from the political and sexual to the ideological. 

Composed of works on paper and video installation, Keating further suggests the body is a contentious site in which micro narratives between these forces play out, tracing how the body is inhabited, experienced and understood in contemporary society.

There is a warmth, a presence in Knoebel´s work that draws the viewer in. Is it the grace of composition and bold pulsating colours or the iteration of touch fabricated by individual finger strokes? 

Knoebel´s work on paper and hands on research recalls minimal, hard-edge, and eccentric abstraction, terms which seemingly fail to hit the mark when experiencing the work. However for Shapeshifters what is clear in the framework of reinventing abstraction is the continuously evolving and shift of shapes, material and colour in favour of Knoebel´s simple and the pleasurable experience of what painting should strive to achieve.

No postwar German painter - Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Martin KIppenberger - can be understood outside the context of German political and cultural experience... Gunter Christmann is no exception.

Gunter Christmann (1936 – 2013) was a German-born Australian painter who immigrated to Australia in the 1960 ́s. A self-taught late bloomer into the artworld, Christmann conveyed a rich understanding of colour and form, composition and drawing were his touchstones.

Timo Kube literally makes use of the translucence of fabric when he stretches fine silk fabric in different hues over mirrors that are mounted on wood in the series Untitled Silk. The mirrors absorb the space including the viewers and throw them back as it were, albeit transformed by the effect of the veil. Here, the veiled mirror does not conceal any stable (pictorial) reality, but instead always generates reality anew from various light situations and viewing angles.

- Christian Berger

Editor, Timo Kube: Sensibilites, 

published by Distanz

Plazas is known to break through the ‘dead normal everyday object’ and invites us to comprehend objects as animated living matter. For his debut in Sydney, Juan Pablo Plazas turns his lavish attention to the iconic Australian image, Sunbaker (1937) by Max Dupain. 

Brussels based Colombian artist transfroms Dupain´s iconic photograph into a series of sculpture and drawings to question and challenge the representation of the body and create an awareness with the use of the viewer´s own imagination.

Griffin’s work investigates the relationship between elemental processes and the human psyche. Building connections through her unique visual language, she sources inspiration from diagrams, maps, personal memories, Indigenous and Western science and philosophies. Griffin inherently portrays our relationship to the natural world and its cyclical affects. Her intuitive approach to painting reflects a desire to blend worlds, both practically and conceptually. Utilising an industrialised tool, the airbrush, to apply dot work, Griffin affirms a confluence between Western Formalism and traditional Indigenous Australian painting.

PREVIEW in ARTGUIDE AU

From the Ancient to the Renaissance to the Postmodern world of information and data: ink scrolls of ancient history to the framework of painting to the pixel - an increasingly poignant reminder of the digitalisation and social transformation of our world - the importance of the grid in the everyday is indispensable.  it divides our world and power. It defines our existence. The daily choices we make. How we intrepret and navigate the world we live in.

" - Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled body parts, Spare terminals yearning to breathe free ."

- A satirical appropriation of the poem "The New Colossus”  by Emma Lazarus

Body Terminals is a series of sculpture, installation and work on paper to explore the evolution of the body in a post-human context.  The affirmation of the free individual in society, as acquired in modernity, has been progressively fragmented by the division of their own identity, by the division and possible transformation of the parts of their own bodies, as terminals of connection and undifferentiated functioning of their origin.

PRESS RELEASE

“ [First Nations] and the environment: these two great historical revolutions of our generation.
Writing both into Australian history allows you to reach beyond the moment of invasion and draw you into deep time as part of our own inheritance.

We should discover the continuities.”

- Tom Griffiths

CATALOGUE text by Ben Gavin

RECIPIENT FOR THE 2022 RICHARD PARKER PRIZE

REVIEW

in THE REVIEW BOARD

in VAULT

REVIEW in ARTIST PROFILE

CATALOGUE text by Ben Gavin

REVIEW in ARTMIRROR

TEXT BY FRANCESCA RECCHIA

(The Polis Projects, New York) 

REVIEW by MIKE R WATSON

(Artform / Zero Books)

TEXT by ADAM GECZY 

(Bloomsbury UK)

'In a globalised and virtualised world, we are made to feel conscious of inclusion and diversity. Difference has never been more ideological. It has never been so ubiquitously high on the agenda. Maybe so high and so universal that it is cancelled out by its own repetition, having sunken into habit. Never has there been so many opportunities for, or never we been subject to opinion. In other words, we are exhorted to assert our voice, our individual voice - our difference. Yet herein lies the paradox: it is precisely that opportunity for being different and unique - "unique" is the by-word of our age - that we brought home to our anonymity.'

- Dr. Adam Geczy 

Extract from text "Different" + " Painting"