Post Space, Exeter is thrilled to present MIRANDA SKOCZEK | RED RIBBONS between Thursday 13 June - Saturday 20 July 2024.

CLICK HERE FOR EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

“Drawing upon a synthesis of symbolism, predominantly inspired by Pagan mythology, and my own lived experiences, I endeavor to weave a tapestry of meaning and emotion that traverses diverse realms of human understanding. This amalgamation of cultural motifs and personal narrative fosters a nuanced dialogue between past and present, tradition and innovation.” Miranda Skoczek, 2024

Miranda Skoczek is a Melbourne based artist whose practice is based on her spacial and emotional responses to everything she consumes and surrounds herself with, informed by a deep theoretical understanding of colour and composition. This exhibition Red Ribbons, titled from the Polish tradition of tying red ribbons to precious objects and people as protection, is a deeply personal exploration of her Polish heritage and the ancient practices of Central and Eastern Europe.

These paintings have become, for the artist, a vessel for profound discoveries and cultural introspection, rooted in the protective aspects of objects, rituals, and ceremonial dress, the work transcends mere representation to immerse viewers in a world suffused with magical energies.

A strong desire for artistic freedom results in paintings which differ greatly from one canvas to the next with Skoczek’s colourful life-size paintings intergrating recognisable forms with abstract shapes, uniting muted tones with flashes of incredible colour. All melding her wide-ranging influences into a visually and emotionally arresting new body of work.

Miranda Skoczek graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art – Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2004, and won the College’s painting prize the same year. She also holds a Diploma in Visual Art –Painting from Victoria University of Technology (2001) and a Diploma of Applied Arts and GraphicDesign from Canberra Institute of Technology (1997). She has exhibited at McClelland Gallery andinternationally in exhibitions in Copenhagen and Hong Kong. Her work is collected by private clients inAustralia, Asia, the Middle East and in the UK.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Post Space, Exeter is located at 100 Westgrove Road, Exeter NSW 2579

Open by Appointment: Thursday - Sunday 11.00am - 5.00pm

+61 402568702

postspace.com.au

@post_space_exeter

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we live and work, the Gundungura people. We pay respect to Elders past and present.

POST SPACE X OSBORN HOUSE

IDYLL

7th - 31st MARCH 2024

ashlee becks, jedda-daisy culley, amy dynan, stevie fieldsend annalisa ferraris, ingrid haughton, leila jeffreys, claire mckay sophy reynolds, tanya wales, mirra whale

Post Space Exeter X Osborn House are thrilled to present IDYLL.

In response to International Women’s Day on the 8th of March, Diana Palmer has curated an exhibition which brings together contemporary female Australian artists whose works stem from an attempt to capture an essence of the inconsequential and the imperfect. Through memories, patterns and the passing of time, each artist explores the intricacies of the precarious times we live through creating Idylls, unsustainably picturesque moments of beauty, evoking in each work a story of repose, stillness, the sublime and fragments of a shared history.

VIEW EXHIBITION CATALOGUE HERE

POST SPACE is thrilled to present a selection of Doug Schofield’s recent works at our new project space in Surry Hills. Dougie Schofield is a Sydney based emerging artist whose work is focussed on the practices of gardening and painting as modes for investigating concepts of contemporary landscape. In recent works Schofield leads us down a garden path where domestic gardening and professional horticultural practices provide a framework for us to consider our interaction with Landscape and Nature.

As the artist states “Gardens reveal our complex relationship to landscape; I believe they indicate a deep desire for a closeness with Nature and a compulsion to curate and control it.” Celebrating the persistent motion of plants and the hypnotic rhythm of their undulating growth and decay, Schofield’s paintings are organic and gestural. Using painting tools to evoke an atmosphere of gardens and seasonality he transforms traditional representation of the landscape through a maximalist abstraction. Here the surfaces are worked, dug, scratched, grown, dappled with light and thick with rain - they are the place from which they were made in nature. Schofield’s ongoing body of work journals and ponders on the bodily experience in landscape in relation to his gardening practice.

As a gardener and horticulturalist, the climate and weather are determining factors in daily activities. Douglas notes, “We are witnessing dramatic, unseasonal and severe weather nation and worldwide. My practices of gardening and painting put me in contact with this change daily.” Schofield’s recent direction gently reflects on our current scenario where weather impacts our engagement with landscape and the natural world and speculates a future which dictates our ability to be outside.

Douglas grew up in Eden, on the Far South Coast of NSW, in his parents rambling garden. This early immersion in Nature has resulted in a practice that focuses on gardens as curious sites of Nature/Human interaction. Schofield has had solo and group exhibitions nationally and has been exhibited internationally in China, Spain, and the Philippines. He currently has work on display in the Macquarie Group collection, Sydney. and 2017 he graduated Fine Art (Hons) at UNSW Art & Design, with a major inpainting and minor in printmaking.

CLICK HERE FOR EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Post Space, Exeter presents Kaloskagathos an exhibition bringing together works by contemporary Australian artists who explore, embrace or challenge classical artistic traditions. Drawing inspiration from renowned works of literature, history, mythology and cultural traditions to explore the themes of feminism, motherhood, domesticity and the goddess, these artists works, in varying ways, embody the power and majesty of female sexuality whilst subverting the classical idea that promoted the supremacy of the male form. 

Featuring Jedda Daisy Culley, Louisa Chircop, Belynda Henry, Solomon Kammer, Sophy Reynolds, Mirra Whale and Hayley West and spanning different materials and formats - painting, sculpture, installation, photography and drawing - these artists come together looking at the relics of the enduring preoccupation of art with the human form as well as contemporary art’s ongoing relationship with the classical past. 

VIEW EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

READ EXHIBITION ESSAY

BELYNDA HENRY WORKS

EXHIBITION DATES

10 FEBRUARY - 23 MARCH 2024

OPENING RECEPTION

SATURDAY 10 FEBRUARY, 2.00 - 5.00PM

Palmer Art Projects is thrilled to present WILL COOKE | I SEE YOU, I SEE ME at POST SPACE, EXETER from Saturday 23rd September - Saturday 28 October 2023.

CLICK HERE FOR CATALOGUE OF WORKS

“I am interested in forming utopian worlds within my paintings that ensure that not only I, but the audience, feels a safety and understanding when experiencing the work. Functioning as portal in which the mental and physical wellbeing is placed over intellectualism and the purely aesthetic.” Will Cooke 2023

Will Cooke is a Sydney based artist whose practice adopts abstraction to explore the intricacies of the human condition through design, music and art history. He produces independent physical objects that aim to transcend the mind and body working between the modes of abstraction and design to breach the relationship between form, surface, and the viewer.

Using Finnish architect Alvar Aalto as a departure point in this series of works, Cooke expands on his past exploration of feeling through experience by wrapping the aluminium surfaces in a painted skin of the artists own experience and those that engage with the work. By leaving a reflective circular surface of the base material Cooke creates a sense of the ‘Moongate’ or ‘shrines to the internal monologue of the viewer’, embodying the human condition, memory and the imagination.

In these architectural bound but intuitive paintings the formal relationship between figure, ground, illusion and colour have found a balance that defy the ascetic, cerebral and arid nature of hard-edged colour abstraction and paradoxically create a body of poetic, warm and compelling paintings.

Born in Sydney 1989, Will Cooke completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) in 2011. He has held numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally and is in held in public & private collections in Australia and Worldwide. Most recently he has presented commissions for the City of Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, Deloitte Australia’s newly finished offices Sydney in conjunction with HASSELL architects as well as Tiffany & Co.

VISITOR INFORMATION Post Space, Exeter is located at 100 Westgrove Road, Exeter NSW 2579 Street parking is available up the driveway to the left of the residence. Open by Appointment Thursday - Sunday 11.00am - 5.00pm T. 0402568702 E. art@postspace.com.au

POST SPACE, EXETER is thrilled to present a selection of Doug Schofield’s recent works in Bermagui at the MOTEL ART FAIR in conjunction with the South East Centre for Contemporary Art / Bega on 28th & 29th July 2023.

CLICK HERE FOR CATALOGUE OF WORKS

Dougie Schofield is a Sydney based emerging artist whose work is focussed on the practices of gardening and painting as modes for investigating concepts of contemporary landscape. In recent works Schofield leads us down a garden path where domestic gardening and professional horticultural practices provide a framework for us to consider our interaction with Landscape and Nature.

As the artist states “Gardens reveal our complex relationship to landscape; I believe they indicate a deep desire for a closeness with Nature and a compulsion to curate and control it.” Celebrating the persistent motion of plants and the hypnotic rhythm of their undulating growth and decay, Schofield’s paintings are organic and gestural. Using painting tools to evoke an atmosphere of gardens and seasonality he transforms traditional representation of the landscape through a maximalist abstraction. Here the surfaces are worked, dug, scratched, grown, dappled with light and thick with rain - they are the place from which they were made in nature.

Schofield’s ongoing body of work journals and ponders on the bodily experience in landscape in relation to his gardening practice. As a gardener and horticulturalist, the climate and weather are determining factors in daily activities. Douglas notes, “We are witnessing dramatic, unseasonal and severe weather nation and worldwide. My practices of gardening and painting put me in contact with this change daily.” Schofield’s recent direction gently reflects on our current scenario where weather impacts our engagement with landscape and the natural world and speculates a future which dictates our ability to be outside.

Douglas grew up in Eden, on the Far South Coast of NSW, in his parents rambling garden. This early immersion in Nature has resulted in a practice that focuses on gardens as curious sites of Nature/Human interaction. Schofield has had solo and group exhibitions nationally and has been exhibited internationally in China, Spain, and the Philippines. He currently has work on display in the Macquarie Group collection, Sydney. and 2017 he graduated Fine Art (Hons) at UNSW Art & Design, with a major in painting and minor in printmaking.

BELYNDA HENRY

NOCTURNAL COMPOSITIONS

MARCH 18 - APRIL 30

LINK TO EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Belynda Henry’s new body of work in Nocturnal Compositions references the deep structure, shifting shapes and pure colours of the landscape through a meditative state rather than a literal one.

After experiencing the landscape during daylight she returns to her studio with sketches, notes and a mind-space of imagery, allowing the works to form themselves by night. For this series, Henry sequestered herself for an intense period to bring together her rich body of fieldwork. She says of this process that she must let the works “imagine themselves, like a dream sequence”.

Living and working deep within a long lush valley along the wild escarpments north of Sydney she is embedded in the landscape and exposed to its ways, witnessing the transitions of ever-changing light, texture and soundscape. All of this she absorbs into her compositions, which are of nature and the infinite fascination of the land. In this Nocturnal Compositions series, Henry takes us to the precipice of total abstraction, yet masterfully holds the viewer with spare pieces of evidence caught within the work, keeping a footing in traditional genre and rendering her paintings are hypnotic.

“I don’t attempt to paint a clear representation of the these scenes but take the essential parts of it that move me. Then, back in my studio, I reassemble the memories much like a mosaic work into a simplified interpretation of the beauty that surrounds and profoundly affects me”. Belynda Henry 2022

Belynda Henry is in a select group of Australian landscape painters to achieve international success, only recently returning from opening her successful solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Her previous U.S. show in New York City was a sell out, with style arbiter and collector Christian Louboutin acquiring more than half of the works.”Magnificent landscapes, and the reflections on the water are oh so vibrant - sublime colours,” Louboutin related.

Born in Sydney, Belynda Henry has been prolific in exhibiting continuously with over 30 solo shows and has been selected as a finalist and won many prestigious awards, collaborated with preeminent brands from Jurlique, to Avis to Clayton Utz and has been

regularly featured in numerous features and editorials including Vogue magazine, and in The Age – included in a feature story “Seven artists you should invest in now”. In 2019 she was featured in Thames & Hudson’s tome, ‘A Painted Landscape’ – featuring

the works of the leading landscape painters including, Elizabeth Cummings, John Olsen, Ann Thompson, Rick Amor among other leading notable landscape painters.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Post Space, Exeter is located at 100 Westgrove Road, Exeter NSW 2579

Street parking is available up the driveway to the left of the residence.

Palmer Art Projects is pleased to be Gruin Gallery's Australian Liaison presenting

DALE FRANK | ARTIST! in Los Angeles from Thursday 16 February - Friday 31 March 2023.

"I like that painting can seduce, that the content can be provocative, sublime, and aggressive at the same time. You never know what you are looking at. The reflective surface is like escapism; it shows the image of something that happens somewhere else. The work in its pure form, it could be said, exists only when you are NOT looking at it. In a way you never know what the work is, conceptually speaking. Painting today must live with its own contradic-tions, in the ugliness of its own beauty, and in the beauty of its own impossibility.” Dale Frank

Dale Frank, born in New South Wales, Australia in 1959 is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. Since the 1970s, Frank has enjoyed a suc-cessful international career as a conceptual artist. Best known for his vivacious abstract paintings, his multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, performance, film, and installation, all of which adhere closely to his experimental approach to new materialities. For decades Frank’s practice has been motivated by his ongoing empirical investigations into the potentiality of painting, finding new abilities and power in painting as integral and crucial to understanding art today.

Dale Frank’s abstract paintings have been exhibited internationally since the 1980s, showing at PS1, New York, in 1981, the 1982 Biennale of Sydney, 42nd Venice Biennale in 1984, and in 1983, Frank was included in the exhibition Panorama della post - critica: critica ed arte at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa along with Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer. Frank’s work has gained international recognition including solo exhibitions at the MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 1981 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2000. This will be his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

“I see what is there, and what crucially more I have to do to go beyond definitions of beauty and art, and beyond yourself. You must always go beyond yourself to what you imagine art can NOT dare to be in your own time”. Dale Frank, 2023

“The tension of opposites is necessary, strife is necessary, be it even just a ‘contradiction’. It is ‘war’ rather than peace or stillness that demonstrates the changes or flux that is the root of being, of everything, that makes it clear that nothing, not even the most stable seeming is really at rest. The same in Art”. Dale Frank, 1983

“I disagree with the idea that artworks exist only insofar as they are available for human viewing. Artworks tend to be more interested in pointing out how they exist, act, and “live” beyond the realms of the artist, the viewer and of human perception, a paradox of sorts given the contrived nature of art-works”. Dale Frank, 2020

“I like that painting can seduce, fondle you, that the content can be provocative, sublime, and an aggressive kick in the groin at the same time”. Dale Frank, 2019

“Painting’s capacity to appear saturated with the life—and the labor time—of the artist, while remaining distinct from it, makes it the ideal candidate for value production in this new economy, the contemporary experience that is busy absorbing and erasing life”. Dale Frank, 2019

“The reflective surface is like escapism; it shows the image of something that happens somewhere else. The work, the Art in its pure form, it must be said, exists only when you are NOT looking at it. In a way you never know what the work is, you can never see the Art for what it really is, how it really independently exists, conceptually speaking. For gazing into it, you are reflected back, in all your distortions and hollowness, adding yourself into the mix, disrupting the plane of honest reality. You become the commerce”. Dale Frank, 2018

VISITOR INFORMATION

Gruin Gallery is located at 8270 Santa Monica Blvd.

Street parking is available on the side streets N Harper Ave & N Sweetzer Ave.

Open Thursday - Saturday 11am-5pm and by appointment

Diana Palmer is pleased to present POST a new exhibition space in Exeter NSW and its’ inaugural exhibition by emerging artist Dougie Schofield titled Gentle Pruning from Saturday 12 November  - Saturday 24 December 2022.

Dougie Schofield is a Sydney based emerging artist whose work is focussed on the practices of gardening and painting as modes for investigating concepts of contemporary landscape. In Gentle Pruning, Schofield leads us down a garden path where domestic gardening and professional horticultural practices provide a framework for us to consider our interaction with Landscape and Nature.  As the artist states “Gardens reveal our complex relationship to landscape; I believe they indicate a deep desire for a closeness with Nature and a compulsion to curate and control it.”

Celebrating the persistent motion of plants and the hypnotic rhythm of their undulating growth and decay, Schofield’s paintings are organic and gestural. Using painting tools to evoke an atmosphere of gardens and seasonality he transforms traditional representation of the landscape through a maximalist abstraction. Here the surfaces are worked, dug, scratched, grown, dappled with light and thick with rain - they are the place from which they were made in nature.

Dougie grew up in Eden, on the Far South Coast of NSW, in his parents rambling garden. This early immersion in Nature has resulted in a practice that focuses on gardens as curious sites of Nature/Human interaction. Schofield has had solo and group exhibitions nationally and has been exhibited internationally in China, Spain, and the Philippines. He currently has work on display in the Macquarie Group collection, Sydney. and 2017 he graduated Fine Art (Hons) at UNSW Art & Design, with a major in painting and minor in printmaking.

CLICK HERE FOR EXHIBITION PRESENTATION

CLICK HERE TO WATCH ARTIST AND PARTNER ON GARDENING AUSTRALIA

PALMER is pleased to announce our latest exhibition, BLACKCURRANT by Sydney and Berlin based artist, MICHAEL BENNETT.  

Michael Bennett’s first paintings to be shown at Palmer Art Projects present what he calls the ‘visual evidence’ of his studio-based experimentations. Taking basic forms from the world around him, he geometrically reduces them through a considered response to the immediacy of the painting process. Information is spontaneously added and subtracted, building elemental compositions that draw focus to subtle relationships between texture, shape and colour of paint and the translucency and direction of its application.

Born in 1987, Michael Bennett is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist working between painting, sculpture and installation. He di- vides his time between Sydney and Berlin and exhibits widely in Europe. Projects in 2016 include: The future will be different, Mini Galerie, Amsterdam; Contemporary Perception, Galleri Bernoni, Copenhagen and a residency and solo exhibition at Lapua Cultural Centre, Finland.

Please click here to view Artist's page. 

PALMER is thrilled to present FEED, a new body of work by Melbourne based artist, Jonathan Crowther from Wednesday 24 May - Saturday 17 June 2017. 

Jonathan Crowther is an award winning artist being the recipient of the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award and the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. He completed a Masters in Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014 and in the following year was awarded an Artstart Grant from the Australia Council. He has been chosen as a finalist for a number of prizes including the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, the Substation Contemporary Art Prize and the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize among others.

Jonathan Crowther’s latest collection of work references the changing landscape of image consumption and the the way we engage with imagery through our digital devices and social media feeds. Utilising imagery from his own device and feeds Crowther has constructed a series of paintings that traverse this digital landscape. Continuing the contemporary conversation between photography and painting Crowther creates hyperreal images that explore our relationship with the screen and the world around us.

Please click here to view Artist's page.

PALMER is thrilled to present NIGHT SWIMMING, a new body of work by Sydney based, New Zealand artist Scott Gardiner from Wednesday 19th April - Saturday 13 May 2017. 

Scott Gardiner’s practice has consistently been engaged with employing strategies that exploit the traditional dialogue between realism, landscape and abstraction. Characteristically involving the examination of force, light and the artists’ personal relationship with the ocean, Gardiner distills the ephemeral qualities of light and motion on water rendered in pigment.

The visual appeal of Gardiner’s abstracted seascapes resides in the contrast between the solid, linear structures and the ephemeral movement of light across a surface. The juxtaposition of these elements evoking both the timelessness of nature as well as the rapid change and industrial expansion that is defining of our times. 

In NIGHT SWIMMING, Gardiner balances the painterly abstractions with faux-collage layers of dark seascapes as each element is sculpted and smoothed into an ergonomic, rhythmically satisfying aesthetic. The paintings, mimicking the oceans surface, are fickle, ethereal, moody and restless; changing colour constantly from cold blue to salmon silver, verdigris, golden polished pewter to the intense sapphire blues of the celestial realm and vertiginous blues of Sublime infinity. As Dr Andrew Paul Wood stated in his 2015 essay, “each painting is an abstract philosophical exercise as well as an extremely beautiful and engaging aesthetic object”. 

ABOUT SCOTT GARDINER

Scott Gardiner (b.1975) graduated with a Master of Visual Arts with Honours in painting from the Auckland University of Technology. He has been a multiple finalist in the Wallace Art Awards as well as the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking and Molley Morpeth Canaday Art Awards. His work 

Please click here to view Artist's page. 

SUZIE IDIENS | EMMA COULTER | ZOE KIRKWOOD | BRENT HALLARD SCOTT GARDINER | ELLIOT BRYCE FOULKES

MIXTAPE features new and recent works by six Australia based artists engaging with abstraction and challenging perceptions of paint as a two dimensional art form by creating entire visual worlds through painting, sculpture and installation. 

Inflected by pop-culture, decorative and design materials these artists all unpick traditional concepts of painting via recasting hard-edged abstraction, reimagining the traditional landscape and/or recreating the ‘non-objective’ into arresting objects of considered form. 

All the while investigating formal concerns of colour, form, finish and spatial composition to address the subjective nature 

PALMER is thrilled to present TRACE PATTERNS, a new body of work by Melbourne based artist Emma Coulter from Wednesday 8th February 2017 - Saturday 4th March 2017. 
 

Emma Coulter’s new body of work operates in an expanded field between painting, sculpture and spatial practice, continuing and expanding her rigorous investigations into the use of ‘colour as idea’ through formations which work beyond the use of paint as a material and begin to explore the ephemerality of both coloured light and reflection as mediums.
 

Borrowing processes from architectural thought, Coulter’s practice utilises acts of painting to transform, construct and alter environments, objects and surfaces. At the centre of her work exists the use of colour as a language to define spatial outcomes. Simultaneously negotiating between the formal and the kitsch; the concrete and the ephemeral. Her aim is to challenge boundaries and make connections between the high and the low, history and currency, the intellectual and the ornamental.
 

In her work, colour is used as a ‘common’ agent to navigate between these opposing forces, where the central concern exists around space, and her preoccupation with its’ utilisation as a ‘medium’. Through her work the parameters of site, situation and spatiality are examined, delineated and repurposed to construct new realities, to question the distance between place, painting and the autonomous art object.

ABOUT EMMA COULTER
 

In 2016, Emma Coulter won the Linden Art Prize and the Woollahra Small Sculpture Viewers Choice Award and in 2015 was awarded the Fiona Myer Award for Excellence at VCA. Having exhibited both nationally and internationally, Coulter holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, (2015), a Bachelor of Visual Art, (1998) and a Bachelor of Built Environment (2000) from QUT. Selected solo exhibitions include, Chrominance (2015) Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne, Chromo-spatial (2015) CHASM, New York, Threshold (2014) Five Walls, Melbourne, and Viscerality (2011) Kunstraum Tapir Gallery, Berlin, as well as numerous group exhibitions, including, Colour Imperative (2015) Rubicon ARI, Faux Fair (2015) c3 Artspace, No Werk (2014) Trocadero Artspace, Melbourne, Abstractions, (2013) Janet Clayton Gallery, Sydney, and The Space Between (2011), Berlin. 

TEAM.WORK is an exhibition highlighting the affinities and separations between selected Palmer Art Projects exhibited artists in an attempt to rethink the connections between practice, place and painting.

Including artists from New York, New Zealand, Los Angeles, Sydney & Melbourne the works correlate on themes of digital manipulation versus handmade and materiality versus immateriality, bringing the virtual into the physical, all within the relative concept of abstraction.

As the penultimate opening for 2016, I am looking forward to celebrating the first year of PALMER ART PROJECTS’ permanent exhibition space and toasting all the artists and supporters that have been a part of the first steps along the journey! It’s taken a lot of TEAM.WORK.

TEAM.WORK. inc.

Benjamin Barretto

Michael Bennett

Ry David Bradley

Emma Coulter

Jonathan Crowther

Mitchell Ferrie

Marc Freeman

Scott Gardiner

Tom Smith

Oliver Tanner

Jonathan Crowther

TEAM.WORK. continues to 31.1.17

In his current body of work, DISFORMIA, Mitchell Ferrie has created a series of geometric abstract sculptures in champagne white marble from Chillagoe in Northern Queensland, known for its fine white translucent colour and strength. 

The series title DISFORMIA is a made-up word, implying a defiance of forced form that more accurately describes the natural process of creating these pieces. In these works Ferrie describes the forming of the sculptures to be evoked and controlled by the shapes of the natural stone itself resulting in a complexity of the faceted works which belies the natural fluidity of the process of their creation and which trancend simple geomtery.

In a reversal of the traditional role of the authority, the carver becomes the performer, letting the stone choose its’ own shape and structure, conducting the artist to the finished work resulting in weighty and yet gravity defying sculptural abstractions which demand viewing from all sides - thus creating a light that lands on the forms and dives through the spaces, animating the layers and facets with each slight movement of the audience. 

Born in Sydney, 1982, Mitchell Ferrie worked as a Master Stonemason for 10 years before working under and being mentored by Alexander Seton since 2011. His work has been exhibited in Scultpure in the Vineyars, NSW, Sculpture in the Glen, NSW and is in major private collections around Australia. 

Tristian Koenig in association with Diana Palmer is delighted to announce the opening of Picturesque – a pop-up exhibition of selected works by Benjamin Barretto, Ry David Bradley, Andre Hemer, Ziggy Grudzinskas and Samson Martin in Sydney at Palmer Art Projects’ Woollahra gallery space. 

Within art history, the term ’picturesque’ originates in 18th century aesthetic theory. Sitting between the opposing poles of the ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’, the picturesque was a category of aesthetic experience derived from the Italian term pittoresco; ‘in the manner of a painter’. For the present exhibition, ‘picturesque’ is used in this more etymological sense, however in an updated capacity. It describes unorthodox material positions, conceptual strategies and painterly gestures that mimic conventional articulations of painterly practice, though each artist works from a significantly divergent position, moving the media forward, within the ever expansive discourse of contemporary painting. 

The exhibition coincides with Tristian Koenig’s participation in the inaugural CODE Art Fair, Copenhagen, August 25 – 28th 2016. 

BENJAMIN BARRETTO | RY DAVID BRADLEY

ANDRE HEMER | SAMSON MARTIN

ZIGGY GRUDZINSKAS

Scott Gardiner (b.1975) graduated with a Master of Visual Arts with Honours in painting from the Auckland University of Technology. He has been a multiple finalist in the Wallace Art Awards as well as the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking and Molly Morpeth Canaday Art Awards. His work has been exhibited and held in private and corporate collections throughout New Zealand, Australia and the United States including the Sir James Wallace Arts Trust.

As a dedicated surfer, Scott Gardiner’s passion for the ocean is immediately obvious in his paintings. Surfing is an intense physical interaction with the ocean’s surface. Modernist painting is an intense mental interaction with the surface of a canvas. Gardiner’s paintings spring from an intersection of the two; a distillation of the ephemeral qualities of light and motion on water rendered in pigment where the ocean is obviously a very powerful creative space for him. They are crystal-clear vessels of alchemical metamorphosis and transcendence. They change as you look at them. You can taste the salt in their sunlight.

Gardiner weaves together two co-existing universes. Often there is a naturalistic depiction of the sea, but lest we forget we are looking at a flat surface and not through a window, his is often integrated with repetitive grid-like forms that mimic light glancing off rhythmic waves like an Art Deco stained glass depiction of the sea, or girder-like structural geometries that push him into the Op Art territory of Victor Vasarely. At other times the paintings are highly abstracted, recalling the stylised surface reflections of David Hockney’s LA swimming pools or the elaborate calligraphy of Song Dynasty artist Ma Yuan’s “Water Folio”.

To these works there is an almost decorative quality, like the bright tiles and intricate arabesques of the Muslim east and Orientalist depictions of it. Geometry, evolving out of earlier Gardiner motifs of motorways and overpasses, reflects an impulse to fixed order and control projected onto the chaotic, fractal and ever evolving organic forms of nature. 

This new work reflects that closeness to the great unknown, the struggle for life. It manifests in a far greater depth in the work, highlighting the already present references to human mortality in the counterpoints of light and dark, gloss and matt, naturalistic and abstract. The intense blues in this new work are not merely the mirror of the ocean reflecting the sky. Blue is also the colour of celestial realm and higher orders of cosmic truth, the sapphire pavement of the Empyrean, the vertiginous blue of Sublime infinity. Each painting is an abstract philosophical exercise as well as an extremely beautiful and engaging aesthetic object. Each a self-contained idea, and also a process, a continuum of thought and experience.

Dr Andrew Paul Wood is an art and cultural historian, writer, educator, broadcaster, and translator based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Opened 1 min ago examines sexting navigated through ephemeral communication technology and evaluates the act of subverting private sexual transmissions rendering private transmissions public through photorealistic oil painting. 

The artist employs this laborious method of painting to contrast the temporal nature of this online discourse. Playing with the notion of the visceral through the addition of lube, dripped over the collaged images.

McCleary focus on themes of risk, privacy and consent by relaying the conventions of sexting within artworks, keeping the identity of the sexters anonymous by excluding their face or any key identifiers from the image.

CLICK HERE FOR EXHIBITION PRESENTATION

Palmer Art Projects is pleased to present Marc Freeman's exhibition 'Stir The Beast' between 8 March - 2 April 2016.

This new body of work incorporates screen printing and sewn elements into an already multifaceted painting practice. Exploring new ways by which materials intersect, their application is integral to Freeman's composition of large scale works which reinterpret digital into analogue production via both representation of the drafting and construction of the abstract.

Marc Freeman is an image-maker whose work recalls the rich history of modernist abstraction. He creates compositions based on his own set of symbolic shapes, which refer to existing forms and his own internal logic. Abstract painting’s somewhat mythical and devout history becomes a fertile playground to explore its currency. Freeman’s work is simultaneously a product of abstraction’s past altruistic endeavors and a celebration of its wholly egocentric pursuit of self-expression. His work invites interpretation and deciphering, with an understanding that this is a pursuit fraught with difficulty and most likely with no definitive outcomes.

Marc Freeman was born in Melbourne in 1979. In 2004 he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) from RMIT. In 2005 he undertook a residency at the School Of Visual Art in New York City, USA. Since then he has been included in group shows at Bus, Platform, Mailbox, Trocadero, Bright Space and at the School of Visual Art, NYC. Freeman has been short listed in the Metro Gallery Art Prize, the Baker-Ranch Contemporary Prize and the Williams Town Contemporary Art Prize. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, most notably ArtBank and he was featured on the hardcover and in the publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow in 2015. This will be his first solo show with Palmer Art Projects.

NICK LEARY

BRUMBIES OF AUSTRALIA

FEBRUARY 11 - 22 2016

Nick Leary is an internationally acclaimed Fine Art and Commercial photographer whose work has taken him to the most remote corners of the world. With a career behind the lens spanning over twenty years, Leary commenced his professional career in New York, where he expeditiously became one of the most sort after photographers in his field, shooting for high profile fashion publications and clientele including Vogue, GQ, Giorgio Armani, Moet Hennessy, Cate Blanchett, Hugh Jackman and Miranda Kerr, to name a few.

Leary’s starting point for developing a contemporary art career in photography was born during a month long trip to Titkikala, a remote indigenous community near Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. It was here that Leary researched the history of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, being taught by an Elder. Fascinated by the culture and heritage of the indigenous people and their natural soulful spirit and respect of the land, Leary was determined to capture this raw beauty and emotion within his work. Leary’s first exhibition titled ‘Soul of the

Titjikala Colourful’ was unveiled later that year (2005) at Sotheby’s in Sydney. Motivated by a natural affinity for nature and wildlife; in addition to his adventurous spirit and fasciation with all things intricate and unusual, Leary‘s passion for contemporary art photography evolved as he embarked on journeys further across the unforgiving terrains of the Australian Outback. It is here that his ‘Celebrate Australia’ collection was born.

Using valiant imagery to captivate his audience with each photographic feast, this collection showcase complex beauty, bravery and freedom in its rawest form. His most recent collection ‘Wild Brumbies of Australia’, explores the iconic Australian Brumbies that roam in the harshest environments in the Australian Outback. To Leary, the Brumby symbolizes “freedom and rawness” and “The Spirit of Australia” which he can share with the rest of the world via his collections. ‘Brumby’, Nick Leary’s much anticipated first monograph was released in Novemebr 2015 and boasts some of Leary’s most prized untamed imagery from this collection.

EXHIBITION OFFSITE AT:

THE REVY

8 DARLING ISLAND ROAD

DARLING ISLAND (PYRMONT)

In the weeks following Andy Warhol’s sudden death in 1987, photographer David Gamble was asked by Warhols’ mephistophelean manager Fred Hughes - whose portrait sitting in The Factory with the Elizabeth Taylor painting is a key work in the series - to photograph the very private sanctuary of the artist’s New York Townhouse and ‘The Factory’. 

Through eight days Gamble photographed Andy Warhol’s rooms, closets, shoes, clothing as well as jewellry and wigs loaned back specially by the Warhol Foundation to depict an indirect, yet deeply intimate portrait of a mysterious life defined by art, fame and wealth.

From the medicine cabinet, filled with products testifying to Warhol’s reputation as a world-class hypochondriac and which Gamble feels was “the closest I came to photographing Andy through his objects” to the decidedly dreary kitchen and empty chair, reflecting the earlier loss of his mother who had lived with him until her death in 1972. 

Significant in this series is the final soup can Warhol consumed prior to his routine gallbladder surgery. The Can is photographed in The Kitchen and then re-photographed in Gamble’s studio in 1997 as it continued to deteriorate. The Campbell’s Soup Can being critical to Warhol’s life - both in his work and in his claim that he ate it every day for 20 years. As the critic Robert Hughes stated in 1971 ‘’Painting a soup can is not in itself a radical act...But what was radical in Warhol was that he adapted the means of production of soup cans to the way he produced paintings, turning them out en masse - consumer art mimicking the the process as well as the look of consumer culture.’’ 

In photographing this portrait series, Gamble’s sense of something being unresolved, in both Warhol’s sudden and shocking death and in the assignment feeling incomplete, was resolved by superimposing a silk-screen spectre of Warhol upon the scenes. Working with Adplates’ technicians using a Quantel Paintbox computer system, the photographer conjured images of Warhol to haunt the photographs of his living spaces. Two-dimensional reconstructions of the pop artist sit ill-at-ease in the Art Deco room and on an Egyptian throne in the parlour. His face has even mysteriously etched itself on to the cover of the magazine that Hughes holds in his hands and which, on the original, remained unhelpfully blank.

ABOUT DAVID GAMBLE

Born in London and now in New York, David Gamble is a photographer and painter of international acclaim. Winner of the Grand Prix European Award, Best Photographer in Europe, Arles, France 1987, the World Press Award Holland (1988, 2nd prize, Science & Technology) for his portrait of Stephen Hawking, which was used as the cover for Hawking’s crucial book A Brief History of Time, and The American Photography Award (1989). Working throughout the 80s/early 90s for Observer Magazine, Independent, Sunday Times, Telegraph, Traveller Magazine, Time-Life, Fortune (NY), Paris Match, The New Yorker, Newsweek (NY), his back-list is a who’s who in pictures: every shot a winner, every detail sharp yet subtle. His photographs are in major institutions including the The National Portrait Gallery UK, The National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian and the Warhol Museum Pittsburgh. An important exhibition of his Andy Warhol photographs toured the USA and Scandinavia in 2011.

Palmer Art Projects is please to present Scott Gardiner's solo exhibition Three Oceans Project (Sydney) at Sydney Contemporary between 10 - 13 September 2015.  

In February 2015 Gardiner travelled to Sri Lanka as part one of the Three Oceans Project, which developed out of two earlier exhibitions the previous year in New Zealand at Paul Nache in Gisborne and at Whitespace in Auckland. The Three Oceans Project brings together three coastal locations important and familiar to Gardiner: Hikkaduwa in Sri Lanka, Sydney in Australia and Gisborne, NZ. 

As a dedicated surfer, Scott Gardiner’s passion for the ocean is immediately obvious in his paintings. Surfing is an intense physical interaction with the ocean’s surface. Modernist painting is an intense mental interaction with the surface of a canvas. Gardiner’s paintings spring from an intersection of the two; a distillation of the ephemeral qualities of light and motion on water rendered in pigment where the ocean is obviously a very powerful creative space for him. They are crystal-clear vessels of alchemical metamorphosis and transcendence. They change as you look at them. You can taste the salt in their sunlight.

Geometry, evolving out of earlier Gardiner motifs of motorways and overpasses, reflects an impulse to fixed order and control projected onto the chaotic, fractal and ever evolving organic forms of nature. Even these Apollonian geometries must eventually be eroded away by the Dionysian ocean they seek to occupy and master. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

Scott Gardiner (b.1975) graduated with a Master of Visual Arts with Honours in painting from Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and since then has been many times a finalist in New Zealand’s Wallace Art Awards and the 2012 New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award. His work is held in private and corporate collections throughout New Zealand (including the Sir James Wallace Arts Trust), the United States and Australia.

METAREALISM

PALMER ART PROJECT S x GAEMS NY

MAY 2015

Beyond Realism, METAREALISM (SYD) exists in the realm of the imagination and magic, at the forefront of science and in the senses of the higher self/mind. Advances in technology and in our understanding of consciousness have created an atmosphere where what is real, and what is not real, what is possible, and what is not possible, are becoming increasingly difficult to define. Given free reign to the creative spirit, 

METAREALISM (SYD) aims to portray where our visions and dreams may take us. With an emphasis on beauty and articulate detail, METAREALISM (SYD) blurs the lines between our defined concepts and reveals that reality is a work in progress. 

Curated between New York and Sydney METAREALISM (SYD) will be presented at Palmer Art Projects’ Temporary Exhibition Space ‘PALMER’, 82 Queen Street, Woollahra from 15 – 31 MAY 2015.

THE ART HUNTER

CURATED BY PALMER ART PROJECTS

11.4.14 - 28.4.14

Bill Tikos is The Cool Hunter – the tastemaker and visionary behind the culture and design website baring the same title. Since it began in 2004, The Cool Hunter has sought out the most creative, original and beautiful ideas from around the world from architecture, design, fashion, travel, music and art.

This month Tikos brings his vision to an experiential exhibition called The Art Hunter. For the project Tikos has partnered with Palmer Art Projects and The Artistry to construct The Art Hunter experience in Sydney’s Alexandria – a vibrant funhouse that asks: How alive are you?

Tikos pitched the idea for a column about what’s cool to the Sunday Telegraph in Sydney nine years ago while he was running his own literary agency representing writers. It wasn’t long before Tikos was syndicating The Cool Hunter column to a number of publications around the globe, from London to Rio and more. A year after it appeared in print for the first time, Tikos launched the online version. “I have since branched out to branded TCH events, an online store, a physical store and brand marketing and consulting through our agency, Access. But it all started with The Cool Hunter.”

As for how Tikos sources and selects content for the site, he says it is an intuitive process. “We receive a lot of material every day, and we source material ourselves globally. I trust my intuition and I know instantly when I see something that is worth featuring.” The site has a rich art and design focus. Highlights include a house built into a disused quarry in Wales, replete with a library and a cigar room, Metro Napoli’s art-filled subway stations in Naples and the thatched facade of a fruit market designed by Kengo Kuma in Kochi, Japan. The physical nature of so much of what’s featured on The Cool Hunter means it’s a natural progression for it to move from digital curation to offline, real-world curation. “We have had several successes with temporary stores and events, each curated by The Cool Hunter,” says Tikos. The Cool House was a pop-up design boutique hosted in two striking homes in Melbourne and Sydney last year.

For Tikos, The Art Hunter exhibition is a chance to develop his take on the typical, white-cube gallery space and the traditional mode of showing contemporary art. “Art is ever-expanding and changing. I wanted to transform the typical art gallery space in a dramatic way. Most galleries are all white walls and light and not much else going on. With The Art Hunter, we have done the opposite.”

The Art Hunter exhibition has been built into a 500-square-metre warehouse space and includes 120 artworks drawn from an impressive list of emerging and established Australian talent. Tikos appointed Diana Palmer of Palmer Art Projects to develop a roster of artists for the exhibition. “Tikos’ vision for The Art Hunter immediately appealed to me,” says Palmer. “He wanted to create a beautiful space that was totally unlike any of the galleries we are used to; no white walls, intimate spaces and a real connection to each work.” The exhibition is designed as a kind of maze – move from the main foyer through to the colour room, then into a textured room, down a hallway, into a video room, across to a mirror room and finally a confessional space with black light and sticky notes. Palmer worked collaboratively with Tikos and Sydney-based brand-experience agency, The Artistry to bring it all together. “We worked together on a brief for each room,” she says. “The Cool Hunter and The Artistry wanted an installation on each wall and floor, and special lighting. Then the works go into each of these spaces.”

Friends With You Art Collective’s buoyant, yellow MDF smiley faces, entitled Round & Round, have been featured, as well as a set of Philjames’ vintage painting interventions and a video piece by Bridie Connell called St Teresa Swoon involving peach-coloured feather fans. Other artists include Stephen Ormandy, Jasper Knight, Todd Robinson and Sam Mitchell-Fin. The result is an art wonderland. Instead of the energy and animation of the artworks being lost in stark white, they are bolstered by colour, texture and light. While the exhibition is only a temporary experience for now, Tikos says he would like to recreate The Art Hunter again in the future. “There are so many incredible artists doing cool stuff and I want to provide a creative, exciting platform for that.”

The Art Hunter is open until March 30 2014 at 90–96 Bourke Road, Alexandria.

Hours
Tues to Fri Midday–8pm
Sat & Sun 10am–4pm

thecoolhunter.com.au
palmerartprojects.com
theartistry.com.au

photography by Felix Forest http://www.felixforest.com

originally on http://www.broadsheet.com.au/sydney/arts-and-entertainment/article/art-hunter

THE DASH

14.11.14 - 28.11.14

Studio 2D, 119 – 121 Kippax Street, Surry Hills

Palmer Art Projects & GÆMS are pleased to present their collaborative curated exhibition The Dash supported by SOMA STUDIOS and their upcoming series THE EXO.

THE DASH is group exhibition featuring selected artists from New York, New Zealand and Australia whose works respond and correspond to Bertie Blackman’s new album of the same name, itself created in response to David Bowie’s CHANGESONEBOWIE.

Each of the artists presented addresses the role of artist, at times is best understood as that of the voyeur, the silent watchers capturing and re-presenting what they observe.

While several artists deal with the cult of celebrity and the never ending spotlight, such as David Gamble’s 1987 photographs of Andy Warhol’s apartment taken the day after his death. Others like Alice Couttoupes photographic visions of ‘Critical Whiteness’ explore the experience of seeing, to have one’s vision obscured, and what it means to see without permission.

New Zealand artist Scott Gardiner’s landscapes appear both familiar and otherworldly, trapped in a man-made structure – the vision is a subtle musing on the meaning of life and death.

This theme is more recognizably evident in Juan Ford’s ‘The Emissary’ from his 2007 exhibition ‘Inverted World’. Depicting a highly realistic floating human skull with gum leaves flowing from its mouth. The relationship between human death and regeneration is explored through a hyper realism that also explores the relationship of the viewer to the problems of painting and as he states it’s “would be executioner, photography”.

The original CHANGESONEBOWIE cover was shot by Tom Kelley, who took the famous nude calendar photographs of Marilyn Monroe in 1949. Linking back to Monroe, THE DASH features photography by Elliot Goldstein with a candid shot of a Bert Stern Marilyn set with a bouquet of white lillies, as well as an original Bert Stern photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Rockstar shots of New Yorks Artist, Muse and Collector Natalie White, standing nude in a corridor, by the renown photographer Olivier Zahm, editor of purple mag, add to a timeless Warhol­esque pop and bravado.

A potentially false bravado that, like Bowie’s vision of dystopia, is carried throughout the exhibition.

 LIST OF ARTISTS

ALICE COUTTOUPES – BERT STERN – BERTIE BLACKMAN – DAVID GAMBLE –DINA BROADHURST – ELLIOT GOLDSTEIN – ELIZABETH WATERMAN – JAMES POWERS – JUAN FORD – NATALIE WHITE – OLIVIER ZAHM – OLIVER WATTS –SAM MITCHELL-FIN – SCOTT GARDINER – WILL COOKE

Palmer Art Projects is pleased to present ‘Lost & Found’ a two man solo exhibition by New York based artists Jonathan Rosen & Tom Smith at PALMER between 5 - 27 February 2016.

Tom Smith’s surreal abstractions are vibrating interplays of two paintings spliced and interlaid together, distorting the viewers reading of the inner and outer world of the image and questioning our conditioning towards recognition of the conscious and the subconscious.

He is an artist firmly rooted in a new generation of IRL painters bringing digital imagery and topographies to their painted or sculptural analog works. Like a Kraftwerkian man-machine, he replicates the shapes and textures of Adobe Illustrator, or the glitches found in video interlacing with acrylic, spray paint, and collage materials.

Jonathan Rosen’s work explores the personal complexity of love, dreaming and desire in his next series of large collages. The meticulously crafted pieces made from found objects and collections embody ‘labor of love’ and/or love as labor. Rosen carves the words ‘I Want…’ along with his innermost desires out of the canvas. What is left (lost) is a window in the canvas exposing his often universal conditions and ideas of love and want.

Through this show, Rosen brings his personal wants and dreams quite literally to the surface for an intimate engagement with themes of hope, ambition, and loneliness. Rosen’s five large canvasses each address various ‘wants’ of the artist: from wanting to escape, to wanting to be a expressed, wanting to be loved. Each ‘dream’ the artist expresses in these works are deeply personal while at the same time universally resonant.

‘Lost & Found’ follows on from their first Australian solo exhibition ‘The Knot’ in 2015, described by Nicholas Forrest, Blouin Artinfo, as an exhibition wherein “both artists explore the flexibility of the picture surface while at the same time challenge prevailing perceptions of its status and function” as well as Jonathan Rosen’s highly acclaimed solo exhibition in December 2015 at Colette in Paris.

Opening Hours

Wed - Saturday 11 - 5pm