Film still with Julian Dashper

Starting August 26, 2010, on YouTube, you can view the film My Space, by Simone Horrocks & Richard Flynn with Julian Dashper.

Early in 2008, Dashper approached film makers Simone Horrocks and Richard Flynn, with the idea of collaborating on a film project. It was important to Dashper that we remain open to where the filming might take us, but together we agreed that the film in some way would be : ‘A meditation on the meaning of success and failure in an artist’s life’.

We filmed with Dashper between June and October 2008, as he travelled between Auckland, Sydney and Chicago. It was Dashper’s wish that my space would premiere on YouTube.

Marlene Sarroff
Disruptive Elements, 2010
Corrugated cardboard, paint

August 26 – September 4, 2010

The exhibition, Disruptive Elements, explores the dynamic interconnection between the striated surface space and the smooth surface space. When the smooth space is disturbed interrupted and ruptured by the intervention of cutting peeling and repositioning a process of change brings into being a striated space. The striated space becomes new territory, emerging and, developing a dialogue with the smooth. The smooth and striated space is found on the surface of corrugated cardboard which consists of several large black, rectangular and square works. These works are assembled together, some overlapping, like a cluster, strategically placed, and resting against the gallery wall. Several parts make up one complete work. They are connected although they can be separated or rearranged into other configurations and are capable of producing any number of effects. In the gallery space another form of disruptive elements emerges resulting from the way the works are placed, causing a sense disruption for the viewer whilst in the gallery space itself.

Marlene Sarroff’s work is concerned with materials and process. She uses very ordinary industrial materials and then sets about a process to manipulate them enough so as new work evolves, whilst at the same time, being true to the material. Previously, she has used soft, light materials such as bubble wrap and used a process of winding around. In Disruptive Elements mostly the material is hard and the process of cutting and peeling presents a bolder aesthetic. However, one work in the exhibition does continue the process of winding. White elastic is wound and stretched around a frame, completely covering it, and creating a contrast to the hard surfaced cardboard works. So the hard and soft creates a contrast of surfaces and continues a process used previously by the artist.

Factory 49
49 Shepherd St
Marrickville, Sydney, Australia

August 5-28, 2010

David Thomas, Duration circle (Yellow), 2010
Acrylic on photoprint, 21 x 29.7 cm

August 12-28, 2010

Daniel Göttin, Untitled, 2008 (detail)
Adhesive tape on anodized aluminium

August 14 – September 29, 2010

Richard van der Aa, Reasons to be cheerful:
Paris winter series no.13, 2009
Acrylic on paper, 19 x 24 cm

August 12-21, 2010

One of the streams in Richard van der Aa’s work of recent years is an ongoing series of paintings entitled Reasons to be cheerful. The Reasons to be cheerful paintings have been realised in a variety of forms and scales. From the tiny aluminium tablets which were shown throughout the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2006 as a part of the Out of Erewhon exhibition, to the bi-chromatic square panels exhibited recently at le Pavé d’Orsay in Paris, the “reasons” consistently underline the comprehension that, above all, a painting is an object to be appreciated in relation to others, and in the context of the physical space of the showroom.

At Factory 49 van der Aa is presenting a fresh incarnation of this series. The group of works on paper subtitled Paris winter series is a series of simple compositions utilising a limited palette of three colours: (grey, white and a dirty cream – the colours of Paris winter). The group of 25 small paintings can be read sequentially as each composition is born out of a formal adjustment made to the previous one. The emphasis is on relationships of form.
There is similarity and difference and a sort of visual logic at work, a sense that each painting is the natural extension of the system set up in the preceding pieces. Each one exists as a matter of course. Each one is a reason to be cheerful.

Richard van der Aa was born in New Zealand to Dutch parents and has lived in Paris since 2005 after spending 15 years in Sydney.

Works from the 25 – 25 IS (2010) on the floor at SNO
(l to r, t to b) Tilman, Tallman, Heerkens, Hallard, Hsiao,
Arts, Voskuil, Winkler, Andrews, Roux, Dahlhausen,
Van Der Graaf, Deleget, Van Der Aa

August 7-29, 2010

Solo Installations
Guido Winkler & Iemke van Dijk

25 -25 IS Box
The 25 – 25 IS box contains work of 25 artists at 25 x25 cm. The edition consists of 75 boxes. Available at 395 EUR / 575 AUD. Participating artists include: Justin Andrews, Linda Arts, Chris Ashley, Sanne Bruggink, Christoph Dahlhausen, Matthew Deleget, Rene Eicke, Billy Gruner, Brent Hallard, Jose Heerkens, Gilbert Hsiao, Arjan Janssen, Sarah Keighery, Alexandra Roozen, Leopoldine Roux, Giles Ryder, Clary Stolte, John Tallman, Tilman, Richard Van Der Aa, Iemke Van Dijk, Jasper Van Der Graaf, Henriette Van ‘t Hoog, Jan Maarten Voskuil and Guido Winkler.

IS Group Show
Participating artists include: Jose Heerkens, Henriette van ‘t Hoog, Arjan Janssen, Jasper van der Graaf and Jan Maartin Voskuil

Christoph Dahlhausen, Study for intervention, 2010

July 31 – October 31, 2010

Curator: Lesley Harding

This project by Christoph Dahlhausen (Germany) and David Thomas (Australia), their second collaboration, takes the form of a series of minimalist and subtle interventions in the transitory spaces and often overlooked zones at Heide.

Employing a range of materials—paint, mirror, reflective metals, vinyl, colour and light—within the site and architecture of the Museum, the artists encourage active looking and engagement and connect experiences of the exterior and interior, nature and culture, macro and micro. They also pose questions about how perception is affected by time, space, light, movement and materiality.

Julian Dashper
‘Untitled (I’m Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue #10), 2010 (detail)
Acrylic paint on wall
Each dot 8mm in diameter placed 60cm apart

Opens July 9, 2010

Work by Julian Dashper, Victoria Munro, Kyle Jenkins and replica furtniture of Donald Judd

Location:
Attic Contemporary Art Space
264 Margaret Street, Toowoomba, Qld, 4350

John Nixon, Nine Colour Flag 2009
Enamel on MDF
45 x 60 cm

Friday, June 25, 2010, 1pm

At this screening John Nixon will introduce Colour-Rhythm Films 2006-2008 and The Donkey’s Tail: Ad Hoc Blues (Seven Short Silver Films) 2008, both of which are extensions of his polychrome and silver paintings. There will be a brief introduction in which the artist will discuss both films in the context of his broader ideas of art, his core practice of painting and put forward a model of practice that is multidisciplinary involving his work as a painter, filmmaker, musician, photographer, and independent curator.

About the artist:
John Nixon was born Sydney in 1949 and lives in Briar Hill, Melbourne. His first solo exhibition was in 1973 at Pinacotheca, Melbourne. In 1982 he was selected by Germano Celant to represent Australia at Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany. In 1999 he was winner of Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, Melbourne and in 2001/02 Recipient of Australia Council Fellowship Award.

Since 2000 the artist has held large-scale exhibitions surveying aspects of his work from 1968-2005 at the following museums and galleries: Kunstmuseum Singen, Germany; Kunstmuseum Baselland, Basle, Switzerland; Stiftung fur Konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and works from 2006-2007 TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville.

His work is included in all major State Museum collections in Australia. Major holdings of his work are in the Chartwell Collection Auckland, Stiftung fur Konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and the Daimler Collection, Stuttgart, Germany.

In Auckland John Nixon is represented by Sue Crockford Gallery – he stages regular solo exhibitions there and at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney; Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth; Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington; Galerie Mark Muller, Zurich.

Installation view

June 22 – July 17, 2010

A new solo exhibition by Australian artist John Nixon.

Artist Christopher Dean

June 17-26, 2010

Twelve Rules for a New Academy (gender & sexuality) is the title of Christopher Dean’s forthcoming exhibition at Factory 49, Sydney. The title directly references Ad Reinhardt’’s 1953 manifesto ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’, a statement that maps out the rights and wrongs of art. Rather than presenting the art going public with a list of objective commandments Dean’s exhibition speaks from a more intimate and subjective position.

Dean’s interpretation of Twelve Rules for a New Academy consists of twelve small pencil drawings on paper using quotes beginning with the word ‘I’. As the exhibitions subtitle suggests all of the quotes contained within the drawings make reference to the theme of gender and sexuality. The design of each drawing uses a font derived from children’s ABC building blocks. Bursting out from the centre of the gridded text in each work is a pink trapezoidal shape, paying homage to Reinhardt’s monochromes and the emblems of Russian Constructivism that inspired them.

Studio view with Robert Jacks

June 3 – July 3, 2010

Jan van der Ploeg, Wall Painting #279, 2010
Installation view

April 16 – May 1, 2010

David Thomas, Monochromes in Time and Space:
Hamburg Hauptbahnof, 2008
Enamel on photograph on Dibond, 52 x 69 cm

March 27 – April 28, 2010

Installation view

March 6-31, 2010

Anyone familiar with astrology knows the twelve zodiac signs can be grouped according to four elements– fire, earth, air, and water—each of which affects the profile of the signs it governs. There is however a further way of organizing the twelve signs, grouping them into three quadruplicities according to their “quality:” cardinal (enterprising and commanding), mutable (subject to change), or fixed (stable).

Tomislav Nikolic has referred to astrology in other exhibitions where it functioned simply as an organizing principle, a way of generating and combining work. Here, recourse to the three astrological qualities allowed for an exhibition to be conceived as a whole, the three groups of works existing in a relationship that, given one’s inclination, could be read astrologically, or, more to the point, can be approached formally. Nikolic is a painter who starts with astrology, when the need arises, but he ends somewhere very different.

His painting process is time- and labour-intensive. Eighty coats of paint or more is not uncommon; what results are paintings that can suggest disembodied fields of colour, hazes of subtly shifting chromatic effects produced by the particularities of a painting’s place on any wall. Yet as much as Nikolic works—for weeks sometimes on an individual canvas—to make this possible, and as much as the works’ scale and low-to-the-ground installation produce the effect that we could walk into them and they could enfold us, they are more than the sum of the effects they produce. With Nikolic’s longstanding attention to painted “frames” on the canvas and the varieties of painted edges that contain them, these works want to remind us that they are physical objects too.

Icon painting’s reverence for process and its meditative intensity were important early sources. Process and intensity continue to define his painting practice which now nods as well to the history of Western painting, here in very subtle acknowledgements of Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko. The stretcher size of the “Cardinal” paintings is identical to one Bacon used while the “Fixed” paintings owe their scale to Rothko; in addition, Bacon’s gold frames have been transmuted into halos by the optical effect of gold leaf on the back of the “Cardinal” canvases. These acknowledgements are almost invisible for the halo effect isn’t constant and scale registers physically as much as visually but Nikolic’s painting relies on tiny subtleties for its effect. If that effect finds no ready place in painting’s history– the term “modernist abstraction” scarcely begins to account for his work—it may be because Nikolic is doing something genuinely his own.

–Ingrid Periz

Douglas Witmer, Things Mean a Lot at the Time, 2010
Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 20 x 24 inches

March 4-27, 2010

Blank Space Gallery presents Ring The Bells Anew, an exhibition of recent paintings by Douglas Witmer. This is the artist’s third solo show in New York, and his first with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Witmer has gained increasing attention for his uniquely distilled sensibility related to his paintings’ surface and color. His recent canvases feature one or two rectangles of solid color on top of and interacting with varied gray washes that cascade down the painting’s surface. Though reductive in their attitude and appearance, the resulting works are anything but “minimal.”

Contrary to first impressions, Witmer’s compositions are not planned or diagrammed. For the artist, painting is a process of inquiry; each piece is an individual result of decisions made intuitively and directly.

The critic and art historian Vittorio Colaizzi has written, “Witmer paints the inheritance of modernist abstraction, and perhaps, metaphorically, the more ecumenical spirituality of today, in the openness of his compositions, their perpetual almost-ness, and their refusal of closure or perfection.”

About the title for this exhibition the artist states, “I am trying to underscore the idea that my paintings embody new acts of declaration using long-existing means. Taken further, it communicates a hope in the continued relevance of abstract painting.”

Douglas Witmer holds a B.A. from Goshen College and an M.F.A. from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In New York his work has recently appeared at P.S.1/MoMA in the group exhibition “Minus Space,” as well as The Painting Center and M55 Art in Long Island City. Other recent venues include: Pharmaka in Los Angeles, Gallery Siano in Philadelphia, The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton in Ohio, Sydney Non-Objective in Australia, and Bus-Dori Project Space in Tokyo, Japan. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Sydney Ball, Zianexis, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 168 cm

March 4-21, 2010

The following extract is taken from ‘Sydney Ball: prophet of abstraction’ by Wendy Walker, Sydney Ball: The Colour Paintings 1963–2007, p21

The emergence at the end of the 1990s of an insistent form in Ball’s paintings – reminiscent of shapes in early drawings of rock formations from his landscape works – gave rise to the asymmetrical, ragged-edged motifs in the abstract paintings of Structures 1, exhibited at Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art in 2005. Striking in its formal ascetic restraint, the subtitle of Structures 2 (2007), Abstract Architecture, is an indication that Ball’s point of reference for the new series of work was architectural form in space; specifically, both the contemporary architecture of Zaha Hadid and the reductive modernist constructions of Mies van der Rohe (prior to his art studies Ball’s background was in architecture).

The dynamism of Ball’s paintings is predicated on arigorous attention to the nuances of colour relationships. His selection of colours (secondary and tertiary) is compelling for they are rarely straightforward and frequently unexpected.

From the outset, Ball has maintained that the circle motif – critical to the graphic potency of the highly-resolved Cantos – represented the Chinese symbol for infinity. In the vibrant paintings of the 2007 Structures 2 series Ball reinstates the disc within a square as a strategy (as it was in the 1960s) for the introduction of additional colour.

Ball’s oeuvre may be regarded as a succession of evolutions, in which each concept is comp-rehensively worked through and continually reassessed, so that even within series there is conscious variation. Paralleling the ambitious scale of his paintings is a continual desire to push the boundaries. This willingness to experiment and to take risks propelled his move to New York and, later, his extensive travels in Japan, China, Korea and India, where he sought out sites of spiritual and cultural significance. His journey has resulted in a remarkable body of work of which the enduringly authoritative colour paintings in this exhibition are a significant part.

Studio view

March 4-27, 2010

Francesca Mataraga, Abstrakt Painting, 2009

November 18-28, 2009

Francesca Mataraga presents her new work Abstrakt Painting at Factory 49. Abstrakt Painting consumes the gallery space with colour, combining canvases with objects, fluorescent lights, painted walls and mirror, unifying the space through the use of objects as abstract forms. In this expansive new work Mataraga explores the possibilities of three-dimensional painting in contemporary practice.

A Sydney based artist, Mataraga has exhibited work in the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize at COFA, Photospace at the Australian National University, Sydney Non Objective, the Blake Prize, the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Ivan Dougherty Gallery at COFA, the Tin Sheds Gallery at the University of Sydney, the George Paton Gallery at the University of Melbourne, the Year in Art at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, the Cross Art Projects and various regional galleries, national prizes and conferences.

Work by Anthony Farrell

November 27 – December 12, 2009

Sydney Ball, Azriaxis, 2007
Acrylic on canvas, 118.5 x 137.5 cm

November 3-29, 2009

Curated by David Hagger

Participating Artists:
Justin Andrews, Sydney Ball, Cathy Blanchflower, Louise Blyton, Col Jordan, Emma Langridge, David Milne, Giles Ryder, Alex Spremberg, Wilma Tabacco & PJ Hickman

Reductive brings together a selection of prominent artists whose practices are concerned as much with the methodology of conception as they are with the production of the resulting work. falling under the broader banner of reductive art, the op, minimalist and hard-edged abstract works exhibited exemplify a contemporary approach to non objective art in australia today.

Reductive art is generally characterised by its use of plainspoken materials, monochromatic or limited colour, geometry and pattern, repetition and seriality, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor. reductive art is inclusive and pluralistic in its approach, including geographic location, age, gender, medium, artistic strategy, and content of work. [MINUS SPACE]

Melbourne Non Objective Project

King Colours, 2009 (work in progress in studio)

October 22-31, 2009

Also on view: Marlene Sarroff & Jacek Przybyszewski

Work by Shiau-Peng Chen

September 5-26, 2009

Kerrie Poliness, Black O wall drawing #6, 1997
Fibre-tipped pen mural
Monash University Collection
Purchased with funds donated by Mrs. Margaret Stewart, 1997

September 7 – October 9, 2009

Curated by Danny Lacy, +/- examines the minimal and the maximal, the reductive and the additive, the positive and negative, exploring the formal visual elements of pattern, repetition and grid across a wide range of mediums. Inspired by Kerrie Poliness’ geometric Black O wall drawings, +/- focuses upon works from the Monash University Collection, and selected loans, that play with formal aesthetics.

DAMIANO BERTOLI | CHRISTIAN CAPURRO | EUGENE CARCHESIO | BRONWYN CLARK-COOLEE | LANE CORMICK | MIKALA DWYER | ANNE FERRAN | MARCO FUSINATO | TONY GARIFALAKIS | BRENT HARRIS | ROBERT HUNTER | TIM JOHNSON | JOHN LETHBRIDGE | CLINTON NAIN | GEOFFREY NEES | TOM NICHOLSON | DAVID NOONAN | LOUISE PARAMOR | KERRIE POLINESS | SANDRA SELIG | UDO SELLBACH | WOLFGANG SIEVERS

September 12 – October 31, 2009

Gallery Sonja Roesch announces a solo exhibition of recent work by Gilbert Hsiao, featuring perceptually-based abstraction painted on shaped wooden panels. Hsiao has been exploring the mechanics of visual perception since the 1980s. The viewer perceives oscillation through the illusion of a continuous wave produced by the physiological experience of space and movement. Meticulously layered stripes in tightly woven structures create a musical rhythm and repose.

“Shape/Anti-Shape” showcases Hsiao’s recent exploration of the use of irregularly shaped supports as a means of organizing pictorial space. The result is a continuously moving surface, which is reinforced through the shape of the painting. Metallic and fluorescent paint is applied with a vintage compressorless sprayer, creating a textured surface that makes these paintings an absorbing experience whether viewed close up or from a distance.

Gilbert Hsiao currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany, after thirty years in Brooklyn, New York. He studied Art History at Columbia University before receiving his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany as well as in the United States, where he exhibited at P.S.1 in New York. Hsiao is a recent recipient of a fellowship in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is represented in a number of private, corporate and public collections.

Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri (Pintupi, ca. 1927–1998)
Water Dreaming, late 1972
Synthetic polymer powder paint on composition board
69.53 max. x 56.52 cm

September 1 – December 5, 2009

“It is not every day that a new kind of beauty is born,” says Professor Roger Benjamin of the University of Sydney, the exhibition’s guest curator. Such is the achievement of the painters of Papunya, who adapted the rich meaning of their image-making to a new context, reasserting with pride and intelligence the world’s oldest continuous culture.

In 1971, at Papunya, a government-established Aboriginal relief camp in the Central Australian desert, the Sydney school teacher Geoffrey Bardon provided a group of ranking Aboriginal men with the tools and the encouragement to paint. The resulting works became the first paintings ever to systematically transfer the imagery of their culture to a permanent surface.

This exhibition will be the first to focus on this founding moment, presenting some of the finest examples from the period drawn from the collection of John Wilkerson (Cornell PhD Class of 1970) and Barbara Wilkerson, never before exhibited as a group. The collection includes important works by such great names in the history of late twentieth-century Australian art as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Uta Uta Tjangala, Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi, and Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, and many others. The exhibition’s centerpiece is Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula’s staggering Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa of 1972, whose visual intricacy has been likened to a page in a medieval illumination manuscript; this work twice made Australian national headlines when it achieved world-record auction prices in 1996 and 2000.

The visual qualities of these so-called Papunya boards of which only 750 or so were ever made make them a unique body of work. Not only are these works tremendously significant as bearers of cultural meaning, but they are painted with a skill and inventiveness that has caused them to be admired and collected the world over, said Andrew C. Weislogel, the Johnson’s associate curator and master teacher, who organized the exhibition with Benjamin.

The Australian Aboriginal worldview is based on Tjukurrpa, or the Dreaming, a belief that the world was formed by creator ancestors who shaped the land, made all living things, and laid out the moral code for human conduct. The many Dreamings that relate to specific geographical features, animals, plants, and the elements are the collective responsibility of numerous Indigenous Nations who ensure their preservation for future generations in song, story, and imagery. Several of the works in the exhibition include sacred imagery and depictions of ritual objects used in men’s ceremonies that would normally be viewable only by initiated men within the Aboriginal community. However, key senior painters have granted permission for American audiences to view these works.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available from Cornell University Press. Professor Benjamin is the chief contributor and edited the volume with the Johnson’s Weislogel. The catalogue includes contributions by prominent scholars and historians present during the movements early years.

Organized by the Johnson Museum, Icons of the Desert will travel to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles (May 3 – August 2) and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (September 1 – December 5).

This exhibition and its programs at the Johnson Museum are made possible by generous grants from the Actus Foundation and the Cornell Council for the Arts.

Installation view with works by Tilman, John Nixon &
Julian Dashper (left to right)

August 23 – September 27, 2009

HICA, The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, is to host an exhibition of artists’ work from PS gallery, Amsterdam, opening on Sunday 23rd August, 2009.

Concrete Now! Introducing PS will present work from artists who have exhibited with PS, including Julian Dashper, Michelle Grabner, Gerold Miller, John Nixon, Jan van der Ploeg, and Tilman. A truly international show, bringing together artists from Europe, USA, Australia and New Zealand it will also stand as the second of a series of annual group exhibitions held by the HICA art-space which seek each year to extend the discussion around the space and its concerns with ideas of ’concrete’ as opposed to ‘abstract’ artworks.

Based in Melbourne, Australia, John Nixon is one on the country’s leading minimalist practitioners with works in collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. “The materiality of my work is part of the materiality of experience. I work from the premise that the work of art exists in a ‘real’, physical, rather than illusory world.” – John Nixon, from Thesis: Selected Works from 1968-1993, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1994

Julian Dashper was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1960. As well as being held in all the major public collections in New Zealand his work can also be found at MCA in Sydney, the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He has recently been the subject of a major touring retrospective in America.

Tilman lives and works in Brussels and New York. As well as his own international art practice he is Artistic Director and Chief Curator of CCNOA, Centre for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels.

Michelle Grabner is a Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The Art Institute of Chicago, and co-founder of The Suburban, an artist project space in Illinois. “Painting is not Painting when it props up the self or attempts to tell stories. That activity is called picture making. Painting is larger than pictures but not larger than its limitations which are severe and singular and sweet.” – Michelle Grabner

Gerold Miller lives and works in Berlin. He has held solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Vienna, Brisbane, Berlin, Zürich, Salzburg and Japan. “Miller’s wall floor, and room objects in public and private space are space-scape pictures in the best sense, because they dare to grasp for the whole – of the world, of space, of the truth, and of the chaos, ramified like rhizomes – that we call life.” Stephan Maier in: ’Gerold Miller, Reforming the Future’, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg 2001.

Jan van der Ploeg is co-founder of PS gallery in Amsterdam. His “grip” paintings first showed up on the streets of Amsterdam in 1996 and he has worked extensively and internationally with galleries such as Florence Lynch New York, Raid Projects Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Amsterdam, CCSC Barcelona and South London Gallery.

Both HICA and PS are artist-run galleries with a concern for developing international dialogue while also facilitating local discussion. While the exhibition space of PS is situated in a canal house in the centre of Amsterdam, HICA occupies what might in contrast seem a remote space in the Highlands of Scotland. Concrete Now! Introducing PS will be an opportunity to demonstrate a shared positive approach to exhibiting contemporary artworks, where the presenting of works and considering of ideas becomes a moment for examining existing understandings and a testing-ground; suggesting and offering new possibilities.

Installation view

September 5-26, 2009

A Linear Construction is Andrew Gutteridge’s new optical intervention. The installation expands the field of abstraction through a numerical and linear response to the interior architecture of Conical. The gallery space is divided and mapped out through a series of lines constructed from black elastic cord. These lines dissect the space and create a physical disruption to the Gallery. As the viewer moves through the space they will have to negotiate these lines. This playful intervention of the lines within the gallery space will create an interesting ocular distortion for the viewer.

Since the completion of his Masters in 2007, Gutteridge has been developing his studio practice. He extends the vocabulary of geometric and hard edge abstraction through an engagement with sculptural forms and architecture to exploit time and duration in order to create an unfolding contemplative experience for the viewer. His work oscillates between the painted object and immersive installations. Both forms of the practice interact with the viewer and the interior architecture within the gallery space.

For this project Gutteridge has developed his previous black adhesive tape installation into a three-dimensional constructed work, by using thin black elastic cord. This new material enables the linear forms to protrude from the wall and span out into the gallery space to directly involve the viewer. Each line of cord is drawn through the gallery space and is positioned by a logical numerical response to the interior architecture. This process begins from the centre of the gallery and is then extrapolated to fill the entire space.

These installation works are heavily process driven, often set up with certain rules or parameters in order to create a desired effect or result. This particular work is limited to lines of black elastic cord strung within the gallery and is spaced out in a progressional formation from the centre of the room. The outcomes of these works are always varied, often, it is the unexpected happenings, which create the most interesting results.

In 2007, Gutteridge completed his Masters of Fine Arts at Monash University. He has held several solo exhibitions, most recently at Shifted Gallery (Melbourne) 2008, Kings ARI (Melbourne) 2008, Span Galleries (Melbourne) 2006-07 and participated in various group exhibitions in Australia and Internationally. He has also presented a series of work at Sydney Non Objective (SNO) in 2008. His work is held in various private collections and Artbank.

This is the first time that Turner Galleries has shown the work of well-known local artist Trevor Richards. Trevor’s practice comprises painting, sculpture, installation, architectural interventions and video. This exhibition presents a new series of paintings and three dimensional works which allude to architecturally modelled space.

Trevor is widely recognised for his formally structured, minimalist approach to painting that is informed by his sustained engagement with a limited range of colours and an admiration for the commonplace. In 2008 he was included in CANOA, a large touring exhibition of Australian non-objective artworks that was shown in three venues in Germany. He was also commissioned in 2008-9 to make a large work for All colours permitted as long as they don’t interfere with commerce, a major international exhibition presented in the cities of Katowice and Szcecin in Poland. Other recent group exhibitions include Fertile Soil: 50 Years of the City of Fremantle Collection, Fremantle Art Centre, 2008; Silver, Artrage 25, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2008 and AC4CA at SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Sydney, 2009.

Trevor received funding from the Department of Culture and the Arts WA towards this exhibition. He is represented in numerous local, national and international private and public art collections. A catalogue will be published to coincide with this exhibition and will be available at the gallery.

Abstraction, architecture and the everyday in the recent work of Trevor Richards, by Carolyn Barnes
The French philosopher Jacques Rancière highlights the restricted basis of modern art, the idea of artistic independence framing all ways of making, seeing and judging art in modernity. Certainly, most theories of modernist abstraction represent art as something to be experienced in and of itself, but the idea that art should conform to a single possibility and direction collapsed decades ago. Current societies are formed around differentiation, diversificationand distributed systems, people’s sense of the specificity of their needs and desires increasingly driving contemporary society in contrast to the uniform, centrally-imposed standards and processes that emerged in modernity. Indeed, Trevor Richards’s current work shows that contemporary abstraction involves wide-ranging renegotiation of modernist models, leading to unforeseen, particular and distinct outcomes in the work of individual artists.

In Richards’s work, the mixing of abstraction, everyday objects and site-specificity has long addressed the relationshipbetween human experience and place. Historical context is also a factor in his current work. The outward appearance of his latest paintings and sculptures is reminiscent of 1960s hard-edged abstraction. Yet closer consideration of the paintings in particular reveals a systematized approach to composition, contravening the role of formal invention as a guarantee of authenticity in modern art. The visual reference to a hard-edged aesthetic draws attention to the changing conditions for the production and interpretation of abstract art over the past four decades, contemporary abstraction being critically engaged in the world in exploring the diverse uses of aesthetic form.

Like much of Richards’s work over the past ten years, his current paintings start with a grid. Each work is comprised of a network of different coloured diagonal, horizontal and vertical lines, each one unit wide. The lines are organised according to the basic stipulation that each should travel from one edge of the canvas to another, or at least appear to do so. It was artists of the neo-avant-garde who assiduously employed numerical and other conceptual sequences as generators of form, rejecting modernist values of aesthetic truth and intuitive creativity. Richards’s paintings are too ebullient to be taken for artistic negation. Although they employ an approach to art-making grounded in process, the resultant works are not so systematic that they suggest some pre-determined end. Rather, Richards’s paintings evoke the complexity and disorder of everyday life in which intent plays only a partial role and most intentions
are only partly realised.

The paintings have a strong and immediate visual impact, but don’t aspire to the formal resolution sought in 1960s hard-edged abstraction. Localised optical effects introduce inconsistencies of depth and viewpoint, suggesting that understanding space and form involves the mind as well as the anatomical machinery of vision. The optical illusion of the paintings is replaced by actual space and form in the sculptures, enabling a more straightforward spatial consciousness. Together, the paintings and sculptures explore the role of architecture in creating and informing our experience of the world. The paintings reveal the basis of architectural form in conventions of graphic representation such as isomorphic drawing, highlighting the role of geometry as a reference point for the field. The realisation of the grids in both two and three dimensions explores the interplay of surface, space and objecthood in architecture.

Sensory experience is vital to the reception of Richards’s work, its grammar of colour and form highlighting the immanence of perceptual phenomena. Recently, the sensory has returned as an important critical framework in debates that seek to understand the social world and people’s place in it, challenging the previous concentration on semiotics and deconstruction. For Brian Massumi, the sensory resists interpretation in sitting outside social signification, suggesting the scope for abstraction to interrogate human experience. Richards’s current work—which depends on the apprehension of similarity and difference—encourages a mode of critical visual thinking that challenges the increasingly superficial terms in which difference is represented in our globalised society of spectacle, the combination of simple formal means and optical illusion forcing the viewer to look hard at what is presented. That the spotlight is turned on architecture highlights its dual life as something that people bring into being only for it to become a primary context in which they act. Richards’s paintings and sculptures, which establish a multi-level dialogue with the gallery architecture, underscore the implications of this duality in respect of art, architecture being a primary context for art’s presentation.

For Richards, architecture embeds abstraction in everyday life. He wonders whether his recent works are an unconscious response to the patterned, terrazzo floors of his house in Fremantle. Previous series of works have engaged the industrial architecture and surroundings of his studios. Ben Highmore argues that all serious efforts to explain the nature of everyday life have to begin with an aesthetic foundation. Arguably, today’s everyday and artistic cultures have their roots in the 1960s. The symbolic languages of consumer and media culture became increasingly pervasive during this period, eclipsing established patterns of meaning provided by the family, the nation, ethnicity, tradition and social custom. The formalist theory of modern art may have lost its currency by the early 1970s, but it has been a persistent reference point in contemporary art ever since. Similarly, although vanguard architects have long rejected the formalism of late modern architecture, its pragmatic version of truth to form and function continues to drive building design across the world.

Today, modernist aesthetics are part of daily experience, not an unfamiliar and intimidating expression of the new. In spreading throughout Australian society, the modern has become stylistically varied and impure, forging countless open associations rather than resulting in the restrictive situation its rigorous aesthetic principles initially suggested. In addressing the circulation of modernist aesthetics through art and architecture, Trevor Richards’s latest works explore the formal and representational logic behind what is now ordinary; his practice of improvisation within limits uncovering the many small, aesthetic transactions that make the modern a part of lived experience in the here and now.

Endnotes
1 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of the Aesthetic, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 20.
2 Robin Murray, Geoff Mulgan and Julie Caulier-Grice, ‘How to Innovate: The tools for social innovation’, The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (UK) and The Young Foundation, undated, p. 3. Available at http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/research/news/generating-social-innovation-how-innovate-tools-social-innovation, accessed 16 March 2009.
3 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.
4 Clare Hemmings, ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn’, Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 5 2005, pp. 548-567.
5 Brian Massumi, ‘The autonomy of affect’, in P. Patton, ed., Deleuze: a Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, pp. 217-239.
6 See Lefebvre.
7 Ben Highmore, ‘Homework: Routine, social aesthetics and the ambiguity of everyday life’, Cultural Studies, Vol.18, No. 2, 2004, p. 312.

Biographical note
Dr Carolyn Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, where she is involved in a range of research projects investigating the role of art and design in public contexts. She is an assistant editor of the International Journal of Design, book reviews editor for Artifact and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Arts Practice. Craftsman House published her monograph on the Hong Kong-Australian artist John Young in 2005.