Painters play games with themselves and viewers, some of which are revealed in two exhibitions that opened in Sydney in March. The Intelligence of Painting opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art showcasing 14 women artists and Chippin Away at Darren Knight Gallery.
Jude Rae is a Sydney artist who claims to like the modest restriction of painting still life. Yet her 2024 painting SL508 has the formalism of a Malevich.
The shadows of the two vessels are hardly noticeable when seen as objects. But drop the meaning-making and a powerful Modernist aesthetic emerges akin to a cross.
Each of the painters selected for the exhibition has written a statement, others less coded than Rae’s.
Jenny Watson, famous for her large canvasses and naïve figures, is forthright about the battles involved in pushing boundaries. She asks what a painting is each time she does one, challenging herself with questions.
Does a painting need a stretcher? No. Can I add an image or a layer of pigment? Yes. “I couldn’t have done the work without conceptual art happening,” she writes.
Kerry Poliness in non-objective wildflower painting, light blue with red, indigo, blue, purple, yellow, lilac and white lines, 2024 takes the concept further and uses the ideas of endangered wildflowers to recreate their essence.
The loss of a plant is represented by a structure of lines. She heralds the significance attributed to non-objective abstraction by listing the colours in the title.
This a thought-provoking show that demonstrates the struggle involved in marrying the world with the heritage of art.
In Watson’s Small Beer, 2018 she foregrounds this struggle. The move in and out of figuration has been a preoccupation of the last two decades and Watson was a pioneer in putting the pathos of life up there on the canvas.
Rae puts it well when she refers to the “ambiguous nature of painting as image and object: an illusion with a material presence.”
Jon Campbell’s graphic sayings in Chippin Away take the guesswork out of the process by providing phrases in abstract patterns that do the job of meaning-making.
There are 17 works in the exhibition, most done over the past two years on linen and board with acrylic paint.
Just the abstract lettering of the 2011 painting Love for example shows the dark intensity of that topic and its sombre overtones.
The white digits 110% on red ground in a 2025 work drive home the heartache of artistic effort and the subtle background of Chippin Away, 2025, the beauty of its workmanlike shapes.
Campbell has brought pigment and thought together in colourful phrases that are poignant reflections with subtle political messages related to popular culture.
It’s inspiring to see painters coming clean about the concepts behind their work. There is a truth to their work that is not often acknowledged.
The Intelligence of Painting is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney until 20 July 2025 | Jon Campbell Chippin Away is on display at Darren Knight Gallery until 12 April 2025.
Images: Jude Rae, SL508, 2024, oil on linen, image courtesy and © the artist and The Commercial – photo by Rhonda Dredge | Jon Campbell, Chippin Away, 2025, installation view at Darren Knight Gallery
Words: Rhonda Dredge