Reality softens, abstraction emerges
John Coburn 'Curtain of the Sun'
Dear Collectors,
Drawn from our Director’s Choice exhibition, this curatorial thread — Unfolding — is a meditation on how artists loosen reality without letting it disappear. Rather than declaring abstraction, these works let it surface quietly through gesture, sensation, atmosphere and perception.
Fred Williams 'Cottlesbridge Acacias I'
In Mark Schaller’s 'Vase & Flowers' (2005), the still life behaves less like a record and more like a recollection. Form lingers, yet colour, movement and warmth take precedence, as if the bouquet were first observed, then remembered.
Mark Schaller 'Vase & Flowers'
Charles Blackman’s 'Striated Lines' turns inward, allowing his familiar interior patterning to become the subject itself. Isolated and magnified, the motif hovers between drawing and abstraction—between mood and mark.
Charles Blackman 'Striated lines'
In similar monochromatic tones, Brett Whiteley’s 'Waves' (1977) translates the ocean into tempo and propulsion; water becomes sensation rather than scenery.
Out in the landscape, Fred Williams uses distance as a tool for transformation. In 'Tibooburra Landscape' (1968) and 'Cottlesbridge Acacias I' (1979), bush, sky and terrain compress into measured rhythms and tonal groupings—not removed from reality, but reorganised by it.
Fred Williams 'Tibooburra Landscape'
John Coburn pushes abstraction into symbolic terrain. In 'Phoenix' (1971) and 'Curtain of the Sun' (c.1973), radiant geometries stand in for renewal, ritual and light, giving colour both structure and meaning.
Bridget Riley distills things further. In 'Fold' (2004), motif dissolves into pure optical rhythm; perception becomes the subject.
In Unfolding, abstraction reads not as escape from the real, but as its gradual reimagining.
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