42 43 ARTLINES 3 | 2025 SPECTRUM A new display at QAG brings together works of abstract art from the Gallery’s Australian art collection. Featuring artists inspired by sources ranging from jazz to geology, ‘Spectrum’ traces developments in Australian abstract art from the late 1960s to the present day. References to hard-edge abstraction — an aesthetic first brought to Australian public attention by the National Gallery of Victoria’s groundbreaking 1968 exhibition ‘The Field’ — feature prominently, writes curator Emily Poore. Characterised by areas of colour separated by sharp borders, hard-edge abstraction imparts an impression of flatness and machine-made perfection to paintings and sculptures. This style can be read as a response to the post war proliferation of industrially produced everyday objects, in which the crafter’s hand was no longer evident. Several artists in the new ‘Spectrum’ exhibition at QAG play with the principles of hard-edge abstraction, using form and colour to impart a sense of three-dimensionality, softening painted borders with hand-finished lines, or layering geometric forms with different textures. The abstract art of the 1960s often made no allusion to any experience or subject beyond itself. This is true of Nigel Lendon’s sculpture Slab construction 11 1968. SPECTRUM Formerly exhibited in ‘The Field’, it consists of a series of rectangular forms constructed from painted plywood that appear to delicately ‘balance’ on one corner. Lendon considered this form, which bears a relationship to the industrial principle of assembled components, as appropriate to the times. Like Slab construction 11, Lincoln Austin’s sculpture Interloper 2009 consists of repeated rectilinear forms, but it was constructed to function as Optical Art. Made from mesh grids, the planes of the sculpture appear to interact when a viewer walks past, creating an interference (or moiré) pattern. Grids have also been employed by several painters featured in ‘Spectrum’ to create dynamic visual effects. Ti Parks’s vibrant painting Number one 1969 exemplifies Australian hard-edge painting of the 1960s, characterised as it is by repetition and variation in equal measure. Parks found inspiration in domestic spheres; in this work, he disrupts patterns he sourced from linoleum floorcoverings.1 A grid of green squares appears to vibrate out of position — an effect aided by warm and cool colours that seem to advance and recede, and by Parks’s equivocal treatment of light and shade. By adding ‘shadows’ that are more pronounced in the lower registers of the painting, Parks gives the squares a sense of varying threedimensionality. Likewise, areas of magenta and cyan in the bottom right of the painting suggest a diagonal beam of light cast across a flat surface, creating a visual tension between flatness and depth, ‘figure’ and ground. Vivienne Binns also took cues from gridded domestic materials — perhaps metal insect screens or nylon flyswatters — to craft her energetic painting Wire weave plastic mesh: a paradox of irritations 2007–08. If seen from the correct distance, its patterned surface imparts a three-dimensional effect, like the ‘Magic Eye’ stereogram pictures popular in the 1990s. Binns paints her net-like designs using modified tools more likely to be associated with crafting than traditional painting, including homedecorator’s foam rollers, combs fashioned from rubber squeegees and paper stencils,2 contributing to her broader mission to create accessible art as an antidote to what she considers outdated hierarchies of artmaking. Helga Groves’s Lithification series #3 2021 is based on minimalist grids, yet it exemplifies the machinations of deep time and relates to her personal history. Her subject is ‘lithification’, the process whereby tectonic forces expel fluid from sediments to create rock. Groves’s layers of translucent paint create an optical weave resembling rock strata. They also give the impression that the painting has been carefully sewn or pieced together, lending a sense of duration to the work. Pearlescent splatters punctuate the painting’s orderly surface — a possible allusion to Groves’s Finnish grandfather, who was an opal prospector in the Winton/Longreach district of western central Queensland.3 From top Helga Groves / Lithification series #3 2021 / The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris AM through the QAGOMA Foundation 2024. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program; and Vivienne Binns / Wire weave plastic mesh: a paradox of irritations 2007–08 / The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris AM through the QAG Foundation 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program Above An installation view of ‘Spectrum’, featuring Leonard Brown’s The cave, the mountain, the priest’s hat – all of these 1996 (Purchased 1997. The 1997 Moët & Chandon Art Acquisition Fund), Ti Parks’s Number one 1969 (Gift of Clinton Tweedie as a tribute to his parents Heather and Arthur Tweedie through the QAGOMA Foundation 2024. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program) and John Peart’s Colour square III 1968 (Purchased 1999. QAG Foundation Grant), QAG, July 2025 / Photograph: Nicholas Umek
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NjM4NDU=