The Australian Abstractions exhibition at the Light Gallery in Adelaide opens at 3pm Sunday 25th July, and all are welcome to attend. Avril Thomas, the portrait painter and owner of the Magpie Springs gallery, will open the exhibition.
Most of the work in the exhibition has emerged out of poodle walk in that these are the representation of the forms and textures that I’m seeing on the walks and in the different lighting conditions.
The abstractions are linked to the 2012 photographic abstractions exhibition that was curated by the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne. Many of the images in this exhibition can be seen here.
All of my black and white images in Australian Abstractions are abstractions from nature. Unlike the abstractions of landscape from the air by Richard Woldendorp, my abstractions of both the bark of gum trees and the coastal granite cliffs are done with my feet firmly on the ground.It offers another way of thinking about ‘landscape’.
The central reference point for abstraction in Australia is 1968 when the National Gallery of Victoria reopened its’ new building with The Field, an exhibition of then highly contemporary Australian minimalism. This has become emblematic within the history of Australian art as one of Australia’s first brushes with and against the vogue of the wider international artistic community as it sought to to demonstrate that Australian hard-edge abstraction could hold its own against that of the established centres, such as New York.
It’s motivation was to signal that Australia had ‘come of age’ in terms of coming into line with the modernist dictates of powerfully influential international, US based art critic Clement Greenberg premised on its rejection of mere photographic representation.