WHITE PAINTINGS Curated by John Nixon
White Paintings includes work by John Nixon as well as Melbourne and Sydney -based painters Gunter Christmann, Robert Hunter, David Thomas and Karl Wiebke. Nixon has assembled this group of white paintings by peers, colleagues and friends who have shared a discourse around abstract painting since the late 1960s.
Art Exhibition
previously on
at
Gertrude Contemporary
in
Victoria,
Australia.
From
Friday 01 June 2012 to Saturday 30 June 2012
Launch Friday 01 June 2012, 6-8pm
Event published by anonymous on Monday 28 May 2012.
Contact the publisher.
The work included in White Paintings is drawn from the period 2004 to 2011, representing the ways in which this discourse continues to infiltrate each painter’s practice and resonates more broadly in terms of a contemporary engagement with modernism in painting in Melbourne. As Nixon suggests “…it seems to me that white painting, historically a kind of tabula rasa, represented a stand against all other types of painting as subject and as scene. Simplicity, minimalism, the monochrome and a sense of making something out of nothing are integral to painting in white”. The exhibition represents Nixon’s ongoing research into white paintings from the beginning of last century by Malevich through to two key exhibitions in Melbourne held at the National gallery of Victoria: Two Decades of American Painting, (1967) and The Field (1968), and through to today.
For White Paintings at Gertrude Contemporary, Nixon has focussed on paintings that are comprised of white paint rather than wall-mounted works constructed from other types of materials. Regarding his selection, Nixon states “The five works include examples of figure/ground composition; all-over non-composition; faceted and mathematically precise structure; and constructed painting with wood on canvas. Some paintings use different shades of white, others only one. In each case, the artist has made a conscious choice to use white on canvas, fabric or other material support as the basis for their abstract work (therefore not cream, grey etc. or black and white). In some cases the white colour may be painted onto a coloured ground, e.g. linen, plywood etc.”. White Paintings is the first project in what Nixon hopes to be a series of curated exhibitions.
Opening Friday 1 June 2012 6-8pm
Exhibition continues to 30 June 2012
Image caption:
Gunter Christmann
Mr Kool
2010
Acrylic on canvas
90 × 90 cm
Courtesy of Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
