The Melbourne Art Fair packed a punch this year with proud and provocative work shown by local, interstate and international galleries.
One painter who graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts a little more than a year ago was making a splash at a local booth. And Sydney’s Gallery 9 returned to the fair with some beautifully executed hard-edge paintings and constructions.
Works made at art school are coded as students learn to play the art game and modernism is meant to have built-in obsolescence.
Not everyone is listening! Lachlan Stonehouse has recycled a concept of high modernism, Colour Field, and reduced it to small colour specks on a textured grid of flashe and oil on artist board, laboriously painting the indentations.
The paintings raise questions about originality. For all of their showmanship, they are ready-to-go products, with mid-century matched by a fashionable pessimism.
Stonehouse has put in the background thinking to reduce rather than reinvent then repeat and repeat and repeat.
Five Walls gallery in Footscray signed the artist after his VCA debut and held a solo show for him four months later that encouraged him to work on his methods. His indentations are now squares rather than circles.
“His first show was a sell-out,” said director Aaron Martin, who was busily spruiking for the painter at the fair and for abstraction in general.
“In the last ten years abstraction has had a huge comeback,” he said. “In the early 2000s you were unlikely to see abstraction in galleries.”
Five Walls specialises in non-objective and minimalist work and has expanded in size from one small room to an entire floor.
Other dramatic displays included Neon Parc with figurative paintings by Diena Georgetti that seem to read the mind of the viewer.
Just as you’re looking around for the kind of presence a painting might have hanging on your own wall you’re confronted by The Collector/Trinity.
The painting depicts a buyer, artist and dealer forming an incestuous huddle in front of a cool abstraction. Mid-century design is fashionable so why not flaunt your vanities?
“Abstraction offers an open interpretation. It’s less didactic in approach,” Martin says, but in the hands of Georgetti it may be a hard sell.
The Fair included 49 galleries, a First Peoples Art and Design Fair, and offers both figurative and abstract options.
Melbourne Art Fair
Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Convention Centre Place, South Wharf
Exhibition: 20 – 23 February 2025
For more information, visit: www.melbourneartfair.com.au for details.
Images: Installation view of Colour Field paintings by Lachlan Stonehouse at Five Walls Gallery booth – photo by Rhonda Dredge | Installation view of Diena Georgetti’s The Collector/Trinity (2025) at Neon Parc booth – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge