Suzie Idiens

6th international biennale of non objective art
Que des femmes/Only women
Melbourne virtual satellite
Hosted by Art Thoughts AU at Yarra Bend Gallery
September 22 - 19 November

Suzie Idiens is interested in the subjective nature of perception and the paradox that arises when viewing reductive abstract art - the effects are self-referential and rational while simultaneously evoking a visceral experience. By methodically questioning the effects of adjusting geometric form, repeatedly manipulating its shape or frontal plane, and restricting the use of applied colour, she asks how the sum of these actions will impact the viewer's experience.

Untitled #2, 2017, MDF, polyurethane, 60 x 54 x 5cm.

Suzan Buret

6th international biennale of non objective art
Que des femmes/Only women
Melbourne virtual satellite
Hosted by Art Thoughts AU at Yarra Bend Gallery
September 22 - 19 November

Stolen Geometry

'On a clear autumn day, I walk along a cypress-lined ridge into a garden filled with a riotous discord of roses, marigolds, dahlias and zinnias. Sunlight glints on the water jets of rows of fountains. I walk on paths patterned with inlaid stones and continue on to find myself inside the richly tessellated surfaces of the Nasrid Palace. These walls within the red fortress, El Alhambra, in Granada, Spain are covered with the geometric pattern.

My works are informed by stolen geometry from these gardens of love that I continue to visit in my dreams.' Susan Buret, July 2021

Emma Langridge

6th international biennale of non objective art
Que des femmes/Only women
Melbourne virtual satellite
Hosted by Art Thoughts AU at Yarra Bend Gallery
September 22 - 19 November

'I make paintings and take photographs of the urban environment.

I am interested in glitch, fracture and malfunction, particularly within regimented and meditative processes.

As John Cage said, "I welcome whatever happens next."'

‘Repeater’ installation, Five Walls, Melbourne. L-R right wall, Beacon I-IV, Tocsin, each acrylic on wood, 2019. 

Suzan Shutan

6th international biennale of non objective art
Que des femmes/Only women
Melbourne virtual satellite
Hosted by Art Thoughts AU at Yarra Bend Gallery
September 22 - 19 November

‘Conceptually non objective, my work explores sensory stimuli such as water, and while material driven, it also examines psychological space informed by color field, geometric abstraction, pattern movement, and shapes and colors I find in nature and our built environment. I think of color as a cornucopia of visual pleasure. It is light but also stimulates an array of emotions that shape our perceptions of an ever-changing environment.’ Suzan Shutan

Suzan Shutan received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, and a MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross, NJ. Her work has been shown throughout the United States, South America, Eastern & Central Europe, Australia and in 23 solo exhibits and 190 group exhibitions.

Suzan has taught at RISD, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Nebraska, Quinnipiac University and continues to teach Sculpture at Housatonic Community College and with low residency MFA students in programs including Lesley College at Harvard, MA. www.suzanshutan.com

Ooze Tar Paper, 2019.

Karen Schifano

6th international biennale of non objective art
Que des femmes/Only women
Melbourne virtual satellite
Hosted by Art Thoughts AU at Yarra Bend Gallery
September 22 - 19 November

Karen Schifano is a reductive abstract painter who lives and works in NYC. She has shown work in the USA and Internationally. Exhibitions in Australia include Sydney Non-Objective, and Suzie Idien’s Project Space in Sydney, and the Reductive Non-Objective Project at Five Walls in Melbourne. The strong abstract painting tradition in Australia has been a big influence and artistic connection over the years, both online and through the artists visiting New York. Cheers to my artist friends down under! Karen Schifano 2021.

Mortal Coil, 2021, flashe on canvas, 71 x 91 cm (28 x 36").

Rose Moxham

6th international biennale of non objective art
Que des femmes/Only women

Melbourne virtual satellite
Hosted by Art Thoughts AU at Yarra Bend Gallery
September 22 - 19 November

My work is based in nature, specifically the mangrove, living where I do on Moreton Bay with the mudflat at my door. It is a boundless subject, my only subject, and there are myriad ways of seeing and approaching it. I have chosen to not settle on any one approach (although the one informs the other), partly because it would be untrue to both the mangrove and to how I work, and also because it gives me scope to investigate in many forms not only the physical, conceptual and emotional content of the subject, but also that of the materials I use.

At the beach, 2021, oil on wood, 12 x 20 cm.

Tracey Lamb

Ode to Marion, Problem No 03 (D), welded steel, enamel paint, Incinerator Gallery, Moonee Ponds, 2019.

Tracey Lamb is a sculptor based in Naarm / Melbourne. Her practice is informed by the aesthetics of mid-century design, encompassing, architecture and interior design. Large installations reference women whose work has been marginalised or erased from these related histories. Smaller works are abstracted fragments removed from their original design context. Lamb is a self-taught welder and constructs her work from her home studio.

Abstract architectural assemblage, The Churchie, The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2019.

She has an MFA from Monash University, 2018 and a BFA (Visual Art) Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts and qualifications in Interior Design.

Lamb has been in multiple group and solo shows and has shown work throughout Australia, also Milan and Berlin. She has also been a finalist in many awards shows and received multiple prizes for her work. Her art is held in collections within Australia and internationally.

Diva, welded steel, clear enamel coating, Curatorial & Co, Sydney, 2021.

Point of View, welded steel, Montsalvat, Eltham, 2018/19.

Lamb is represented by Curatorial & Co, Sydney.
https://www.instagram.com/tracey_d_l/
https://tracey-lamb.com

Guy de Rougemont

1935-2021
France

A chair, 1967, lacquered PVC, 110 x 50 x 50 cm.

‘De Rougemont possessed a unique ability to blur the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts ... Throughout his career, he considered himself a painter, although he was well known for his expressive furniture designs. He once stated simply that he was a painter who designed furniture and made sculptures.’ Excerpt Architectural Digest

‘De L’Ellipse a la ligne serpentine, 2019,
installation image, Diane de Polignac Gallery, Paris

Artists’ home

Guy de Rougemont

Sculpture dining table, 1971, stainless steel, perspex H. 75 x 160 cm.

Spring1883 2021

Aug 4 – 29


‘The seventh edition of Spring1883 takes place at satellite spaces across Melbourne from 4-29 August 2021.

Spring1883 is a young and exciting gallerist-led art fair that presents the best of contemporary art practice from Australia and New Zealand.

Spring1883 was established in 2014 by Geoff Newton (Director, Neon Parc), Vikki McInnes and Kate Barber (Directors, Sarah Scout Presents) and Vasili Kaliman (art advisor), and launched at The Hotel Windsor, Melbourne in August 2014.’ Artsy


Selected work



Nicholas Thompson Gallery

Antonia Sellbach, Framework relief # 1, 2021.
Acrylic on Victorian Ash, 200 x 240 x 60 cm.

Gallery9

Louise Gresswell, Untitled (green), 2021.
Oil on board, 35 x 27 cm.

LON Gallery

Tia Ansell, Miles, 2021.
 Acrylic on cotton and wool weaving, 83 x 63 x 6 cm.

Artereal Gallery

Luke Ryan O’Connor, Polychrome Barrel Vessel, Green and Yellow, 2021.
Stoneware, Glaze, Gold Lustre, 28 x 18 x 18 cm.

Blackartprojects

Madeleine Preston, Self Portrait, 2020.
Glazed and sandblasted raku, 34 x 12 x 14 cm.

Mars Gallery

Eliza Gosse, On the Patio Munching on Smiths’ Chips Carpet, 2020.
Wool and canvas, 28.5 x 23.5 x 2 cm.

Neon Parc

Teelah George, Petal, 2021.
Thread, linen, bronze, 123 x 100 cm.

Louise Fishman

Louise Fishman

'Louise Fishman, whose stylish paintings synthesized modernist abstraction with her identity as a queer Jewish feminist, died in New York on Monday at 82. A representative for Karma, the New York gallery that represents her, confirmed her death.

“The world has lost a formidable painter, activist and friend, whose pursuit of individual freedom and personal expression was her primary motivation as an artist,” Karma wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. “Her death leaves a tremendous void in the art world.”' Excerpt Alex Greenberger, ARTnet news July 26.

Louise Fishman at Cheim and Read

Louise Fishman painting detail

Louise Fishman painting detail

Photos via artist Cary Smith of Louise Fishman’s 2017 exhibition at Cheim and Read, New York.

Link to Cary Smith's painting on Two Coats of Paint

Ruark Lewis

Homage to Orange
Painting installation
April 18

In Praise of Trees, a street event

Ruark Lewis, In Praise of Trees, Homage to Orange

Ruark Lewis, 'Stanza 1: The Orange Tree, by poet John Shaw Neilson, circa 1919.'

Ruark Lewis is a Sydney-based visual artist and writer, renowned for his linking of art, poetics and political discussions. His technique of transcription is a form of abstracting language re-contextualised into sculptural installations. Ruark has exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Sydney Olympics; Biennale of Sydney 2006; Toronto’s Nuit Blanche festival, 2008 and in the 2015 Darwin Arts Festival. Biographical excerpt http://millerspointcommunity.com.au/ruark-lewis/

Orbit

Curated by Paul Snell
Poimena GalleryLaunceston, Tasmania

Ten Days on the Island
March 11 to May 6

https://www.tendays.org.au/location/poimena-gallery/

‘It is what it is’ is such a frustrating statement. Usually, its utterance implies a lack of critical or analytical capacity, often tinged perhaps with defensiveness, or even a lack of inclination to engage. It can of course also refer on a higher plane to the truly ineffable or inexplicable – still somewhat frustrating. Yet in this excellent exhibition deftly curated by Paul Snell it finally has value and real meaning.

The 43 artists in this exhibition are only broadly linked stylistically in their commitment to abstraction, but the overriding conceptual connection is that their art demands a commitment from the viewer to engage with the elemental nature of the work, to accept that it is what it is, no more and no less.

The plethora of terms which could be employed to theoretically ‘place’ these various works could include, minimalist, reductive, purist, non-objective, concrete, hard edge abstract, materialist, formless, retinal, abject…and the list goes on.

As soon as we get involved in the limitations of such defining, we move away from the artwork, or we push it away. As Susan Sontag has elucidated, we effectively kill it, neutralise it.

Laurien Renckens states of her work - ‘one loses oneself in them’. We find ourselves in a new world of ‘delayed observation’. ‘You have to surpass a threshold, to feel at home vis-à-vis this work.’ And this is essentially true in relation to all the work in Orbit.

What is required is a willing submission. We often tend to look beyond the phenomenon of what is actually happening, what is actually there. We avoid the key confrontation which is actually one of submission to the, often ineffable, nature of the experience.

The curator states that the exhibition is an ‘invitation for contemplation and reflection, providing an escape from the daily narrative offering a gravitational pull to other thoughts, processes and ideas. In this way it forms a response to a time of social, political and emotional disruption’.

Entering into these works leaves space for a direct engagement with the phenomena which the works employ/evoke which can involve a transcendence as well as a visceral engagement with the pure essences and dynamics generated by the artist. These may often be defined as the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Artist Kāryn Taylor provides a luminous exploration of contained space reflecting our unknowing of the physical world while Tomislav Nikolic utilises implied depth and advancement to create an active visual dynamic which is never entirely settled. Time is also a highly significant factor in this show - not just the time required for deep engagement but the time of production which is crucial in Nancy Constandelia’s work which may seem inconclusive and indirectly records the process itself.

Process and materiality are central to Orbit. While Khesin, Snoek, Pesce, de Mentis and Windisch engage the physical properties of their media directly, even to the extent of allowing the final form of the work to be determined by the way in which the material forms itself through the dynamics of gravity and accretion in some cases.

The dynamics of the artwork may operate in how they work within a frame or bounded area, from the powerful geometric abstraction of Liam Snootle or to the subtle ‘field’ versus ‘edge’ which is explored by Taylor, Craik, Alexander, Terburg, Keating, Boeker and others. Butterworth and Snell’s work crosses both of these territories incorporating a refined subtle surface backed by, or intruded into, by a raw accretion of disparate materials.

Refined, ‘cool’ constructed works (Wilkinson, Idiens, Parni, Thomson, Andrews and Renckens etc), are balanced by dynamic raw painterly engagements, (Holt, Hart) yet these two have a strong investment in what I refer to as the ‘field’/’edge’ dynamic.

The artists in this show demonstrate real confidence and a deep understanding of what a rich aesthetic experience is. The power is in the honesty and confidence with which these artists work, and the faith they have in the capacity of materials and pure formal engagement to resolve into something transcendent, thus, these works are entirely convincing, at a very pure sensory and intellectual level.

Seán Kelly

Dick Watkins

Such Disparate Joy
Liverpool Street Gallery
243a Liverpool Street
EAST SYDNEY

 
4 - 27 March 2021

https://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au/dick-watkins-2021

Deep Night, 2020, 172.5 x 152 cm.

The Sleep of Reason, 2020, oil on canvas, 172.5 x 152 cm.

Cherry, 2020, oil on canvas, 101 x 76 cm.

Dick Watkins

‘A pioneer of abstract painting in Australia, Watkins is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, most regional gallery collections and numerous distinguished corporate and private art collections in Australia. Dick Watkins lives and works in Sydney, Australia.’

Images and text via Liverpool Street Gallery.