SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY 2023

OLSEN Gallery presents a four-part exhibition for Sydney Contemporary, curated around ideas of Abstraction. The participating artists, CHARLIE SHEARD, MARISA

PURCELL, SOPHIE CAPE, and MATT BROMHEAD, have each conjured a deeply unique visual language throughout their celebrated careers. Uniting the respective practices is a shared sensitivity to form and space, light and colour. The exhibition surveys the great potential of abstract painting in this country.

Since the early 1980s, CHARLIE SHEARD has explored the history of painting in his work. Via prehistoric caves, Baroque architectures, and White Cube museums, the artist maintains that his medium has always been physical and sensual by nature, long before this idea found traction in intellectual discourse. Neither thought, nor narrative, are pursuits of Sheard’s, who instead considers himself a conduit for the direct transference of bodily energy onto his canvas or paper. This apparent freedom, from form and consciousness, was earned over many years learning and teaching the painstaking techniques and theories of colour practiced by famed Old Masters. Portrait courtesy Rio Rosano.

For more than a decade, artist SOPHIE CAPE has poured her emphatic expressions of ancient landscapes onto canvas and paper to tremendous acclaim. It is the tension between two or more things that has come to categorise the artist’s work –whether between the drawn and the written mark, the mind and the body, or the beautiful and the grotesque. At times, all of these dynamics are present at once, offering an encounter with the human condition in all of its power and poetry. Honouring her fondness for the outdoors by working in and with Australia’s bushland and desert settings, Cape’s surfaces diarise the availability of local soil, sand, rust, ash, and charcoal. In recent years, Sophie Cape has lived and worked on Dharawal land, amidst coastal acreage on Sydney’s South Coast. This setting has invested new motivations in her work – as she considers the materials now at hand, and the ecosystems from which they come. Portrait courtesy Rachael Tagg.

Since 1995, MARISA PURCELL has exhibited regularly within Australia and around the world. Her delicately layered paintings still luminous moments in time and commit them to linen. The artist works instinctively, and often pairs her compositions back to one essential motivation – the orchestration of light. The resulting surfaces, manipulated by time and distance, gesture towards an experience of the profound that is available to us all. In this way, Purcell toys with the viewer’s senses and celebrates activity in a medium traditionally known to be flat and still. In recent years, the artist has furthered her exploration of the relationship shared by sound and colour. How one informs the other, though experienced uniquely by each person, can apparently be expressed in the saturated fields of painted abstractions.

Sydney artist MATT BROMHEAD describes his works as quips or one-liners –heralding both their playfulness and deceptive simplicity. Presenting as minimal gestures, his surfaces open up over time and reveal the numerous layers of material that comprise each image. He uses reductionist, low fidelity production methods as a display of economy – interested in making use of what is at hand. Bromhead works between two and three-dimensions and often pulls elements out of his drawings on paper and board to shape found-object sculptures. Here, the artist demonstrates a resourcefulness with his studio practice, spiriting ready-made materials with small, deliberate interventions. Formally, these works are explorations of space itself, and are concerned most prominently with logics of weight and placement. Portrait courtesy Saskia Wilson.

Matt Bromhead Warbles (2), 2023 acrylic and ink on kozo paper on board

Bromhead Captains Table, 2023 graphite and ink on kozo paper on board

x 120 cm #34841 $7,500

Matt Bromhead Planting, 2023 graphite and ink on kozo paper on board

x 120 cm #34842 $7,500

Matt Bromhead Lake (2), 2023 acrylic, charcoal, graphite and ink on kozo paper on board 120 x 150 cm #34843 $7,500

Matt Bromhead Lake, 2023 acrylic, charcoal, graphite and ink on kozo paper on board