From Andrew Frost…
There’s a lot going on in Samara Adamson-Pinczewski‘s work. The title of her exhibition The Beautiful Corner at Gallery 9 refers to the placement of Kazimir Malevich’s epoch making painting Black Square in The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 exhibition in 1915 where the painting was hung close to the ceiling. Rife with religious symbolism in its placement, Adamson-Pinczewski’s own work is far too large to achieve that kind of literally heightened presence, but in her mixture of colour, line and crypto-abstract imagery, the painter has created icons of the contemporary world.
Partly inspired by a range of paints available to her during a residency in the US, Adamson-Pinczewski’s canvases explore explicability as the paintings shift between abstraction – slabs and shards of colour, angled and interlocking lines, complimentary and contrasting colour – and figuration, with the suggestion of space, in some works as a kind of pictorial space, in others a more literal representation of minimalist architecture. “I focus on using fragmented architectonic motifs and oblique linear structures to create the illusion of fracture, sudden movement and turbulence,” writes the artist. “The diagonal planes in my paintings are designed to appear vertiginous and weightless, and to simultaneously project forwards and backwards in deep perspectival space.” Following this simple but effective formula, Adamson-Pinczewski’s paintings explore the same kind revelation found in the borders of Malevich’s black square, yet familiar to anyone alive in the era of Minecraft.
Until February 14
Gallery 9, Darlinghurst
Pic: Samara Adamson-Pinczewski, Surface Slope, 2014. Acrylic on canvas 183×137 cm.
