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Exhibition

Group exhibition

PAINT15
6 May - 30 May 2015

The artists in Paint15 approach painting in diverse styles and materials yet common to each is an element of transition or flux: be it the organic architectural forms of Yioryios, the changing surface color in the chameleon-like paintings of Adam Turnbull with pigments that react to different temperatures and ultraviolet exposures, the hyper-colour fanciful compositions and forms of Louise Zhang or Adrian Hobbs’ cinematic slant on chaos theory.

This pervasion of apocalyptic phenomena and transitory states in the works of all these artists and many of their contemporaries is perhaps reflective of our accelerated net-age digital communications or a collective sense of the instability of political, ideological, environmental, and financial uncertainties of our time?

The seductive relationship between attraction and repulsion is a key focus in Louise Zhang’s works. Her beautiful but strange paintings and sculpture are manifestations of excess while navigating the fine line between the monstrous and the cute and metamorphosis and mutation. Hi-viz synthetic hyper-colours, the allure of shiny plastic and Pourfoam, with accretions of beads, glass and plastics, fuel the alchemy and artifice of the ‘beyond real’ objects and multi-panelled, layered wall-works that Louise Zhang creates. Cryptic narrative titles like ‘I went to Mars and the isolation and the red speckled color of winds eroded my sanity and it was beautiful’ further add to the magicking and fantasia.

Adrian Hobbs acknowledges that chaos has historically been considered the inferior and the opposite of order but that a lot of contemporary thought, from mathematics to physics and philosophy, is now recognizing the essential role chaos plays in all existence. The artist’s works are observations on manifestations of chaos to both navigate and to liberate the unknown and its many interpretations. The departure for Adrian Hobbs’s paintings is an image from cinema – the final explosion scene in Zabriski Point, the cult seventies film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni where shattered fragments of property developers’ unwelcome incursions are flung into the spatial void over Death Valley like so much aerial flotsam and jetsam, prefacing either nihilism or nirvana.

Adam Turnbull developed his Surface series of paintings over the past three years while living in New York and working with a thermometry specialist to create paint pigments that react to different temperatures ranging from 19 to 30 degrees Celsius and to the radiated energy and variations in intensity of ultra-violet (UV) exposures that manifest changes in tone and texture. Imbedded in an abstract minimalist aesthetic where emphasis is on process and surface his works are in contrast to the ‘narrative’ and playful exuberance of Louise Zhang yet metamorphosis and dynamism are integral to both.

All Yioryios’s sculptural paintings are grounded in architecture. The works in Paint15 are responses to spaces within Harry Seidler’s Australia Square and Australian Embassy in Paris and to Utzon’s Sydney Opera House. Mutability and architecture underpin the ever-evolving free-form helixes and spirals engaging volume and space, surface and colour that opportunistically devolve from cut-out sections that are the out-takes from the interstices within earlier of the artist’s larger wall works to create new and independent objects.

Barbara Dowse – Curator

Additional Information

Upcoming Exhibition

main gallery
Owen Leong
5 April - 27 April 2024

Previous Exhibition

main gallery
Hyun-Hee Lee
2 February - 24 February 2024
Louise Zhang_Stickypop_2015_acrylic, oil and plastics on plywood_62 x 62cm Louise Zhang_...it came from Goo Lagoon_2015_acrylic, oil and plastics on plywood_125 x 126cm 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 45 x 55 x 45cm Adam Turnbull_Surface 6_2014_Thermochromic and acrylic paint on canvas_48 x 64cm (Adam Turnbull is represented by China Heights gallery, Sydney). Adam Turnbull_Surface 7_2014_Thermochromic and acrylic paint on canvas_48 x 64cm (Adam Turnbull is represented by China Heights gallery, Sydney). Adam Turnbull_Surface 8_2014_Thermochromic and acrylic paint on canvas_48 x 64cm (Adam Turnbull is represented by China Heights gallery, Sydney). Adam Turnbull_Surface 4_2014_Thermochromic and acrylic paint on canvas_48 x 64cm (Adam Turnbull is represented by China Heights gallery, Sydney). Adrian Hobbs_Bunny Chase_2015_oil on canvas_ 154x 102.5cm Yioryios_AEP2 Black, White, Navy _2015_ Acrylic paint on aluminum_37 x 47 x 38cm Yioryios_AS3 Black, Mustard Yellow, Blue, Brown, Purple & Red _2015_ Acrylic paint on aluminum 37 x 47 x 38cm Yioryios_SOH3 Black, White, Pink, Yellow, Purple, Green & Blue _2015_ Acrylic paint on aluminum 37 x 47 x 38cm Yioryios_SOH4 Black, White, Blue, Yellow, Red & Green _2015_ Acrylic paint on aluminum 37 x 47 x 38cm Paint 15 Installation view Installation view Installation view Installation view Installation view Installation view