Opening today (Saturday 17 September) in the Heide Project Gallery, Antonia Sellbach: Open Fields presents an installation of large modular paintings and timber constructions which extend the artist’s interest in visual abstraction and its relationship to language.
Antonia Sellbach’s practice is focused on language—its ambiguities as well as its logic. Painting’s linguistic potential is tested in her ongoing series of large abstract canvases and painted timber arrangements. She conceives of these works as modular components, made to be configured and reconfigured in response to the installation setting, much like the pieces of a puzzle or game.
When brought together in sets and wall-sized tessellations, Sellbach’s simple geometric compositions begin to read as an infinitely variable vocabulary. Comparisons within a group of paintings or between the artist’s two and three-dimensional forms build connections and dialogue, activating the processes which make meaning. How words relate to visual languages and how words can be translated into abstract signs are among the ideas underpinning this body of work.
Alongside her visual arts practice, Sellbach composes for and performs with the Melbourne bands Love of Diagrams and Beaches. She is also a co-founder of LISTEN, a feminist collective that seeks to gain further visibility for women within the independent Australian music scene.
Located in Heide III, The Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery displays exhibitions that expose audiences to new and innovative developments in art. Such exhibitions foster contemporary art and support an artist by assisting them to make new work at a formative stage in their career.
Antonia Sellbach: Open Fields
Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery – Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen
Exhibition: 17 September 2016 – 26 February 2017
Free entry after general admission
For more information, visit: www.heide.com.au for details.
Image: Antonia Sellbach, Unstable Object #11, 2014. synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen. 155 x 155 cm – photo by Lauren Bamford