From Andrew Frost…
Curated by Barbara Dowse, Artereal Gallery’s annual showcase Paint15 offers for our consideration the work of four very different young and emerging artists with the aim of also saying something about the state of the art. Featuring the work of Adrian Hobbs, Adam Turnbull,Yioryios and Louise Zhang, the show focuses on experimental practices that, while perhaps not unprecedented, demonstrate how individual interpretations of the history of the form can produce some idiosyncratic results.
Hobbs’s paintings Daughters of Quiet Minds and Bunny Chase [both 2015] are part of a larger practice interested in finding patterns in chaos. The images are derived from frames from the final explosion at the end of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Hobbs presenting the fragments of a detonated house as quiet abstractions that take on an ominous edge once the source of the image becomes known. Turnbull’s paintings are another kind of abstraction. Working with paint pigments that react to different temperatures ranging from 19 to 30 degrees, Turnbull’s canvases react and transform themselves as they respond to ambient room heat, apparently fixed but actually highly dynamic fields of colour. Yioryios produces sculptural paintings made in response to the architectural spaces of Harry Seidler’s Australia Square and Australian Embassy in Paris and to Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House. Given their source, the works have an appropriately retro sculptural feel. Zhang’s sculptural paintings and painting sculptures are hybrid monsters of cuteness and repulsion, careful experiments in colour and texture that are also allowed to run free.
Until May 30
Arterial Gallery, Rozelle
Pic: Louise Zhang, I went to mars and the isolation and red speckled solar winds eroded my sanity and it was beautiful, 2015. Foam, clay, acrylic, polyurethane, glass stamens, foam stamens, plastics, 45x55x45 cm.
