New York Postcard: Layered Realities

Distilling her interest in liminality, cosmology, curtains, and veils into sophisticated abstract paintings in the exhibition Realm at Olsen Gruin, the Australian artist Marisa Purcell creates spaces for the imagination, both hers and ours. Working intuitively and experimentally, Purcell weaves layers of realities borne from various experiences into works with visual and emotional depth. The graceful subjectivity of Purcell’s many colour fields is further activated with elements from her established visual language, which create statements at once sharp and ambiguous, like removing veils without knowing what you are looking for.

Have you seen the Listers? Up high, on the ground, the tags are all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. After what has been a prolific couple of years for Australian painter Anthony Lister, his latest international show, The Art of Fact, at Allouche Gallery is an extensive, colourful, and well-thought-out exhibition. The paintings transfer deep observations (mostly) of New York with vigour and matter-of-factness on canvases S to XL. This new work is based on the contemplation that if ‘art’ is an abbreviation of ‘artifact,’ then he is a painter of facts.

All images ©Anthony Lister of Allouche Gallery

They are the places that don’t scream for attention, but ones that wink at you, according to Australian photo artist George Byrne, a long-time resident of Los Angeles where these images where created. In his exhibition New Order at the Australian Consulate, Byrne responds to the city’s flirtatious architecture with its pokey treasures, colours of yesteryear, and playful angularity. Byrne constructs images, sometimes composites, with an obvious love of modernist painting and urban landscapes. If art is truly a form of artifice, then Los Angeles must feel like a fantasy come true.

All images ©George Byrne of Olsen Gruin Gallery