“These works incorporate the malady of ‘double vision’ as an analogy to the world’s precarious stability.”
Gallery 9 is pleased to present this exhibition of Simon Blau’s latest body of work. After eight successive exhibitions documenting the artist’s evolution as a hard edge non-objective painter Blau has moved studios and significantly altered his paintings’ appearances. To mark the departure Blau has avoided geometry and has allowed his marks to flow without mathematically informed guidance or masking. There are fewer straight lines and fewer quadrilaterals of opaque colour than were typical in other recent works and while always visible, the handmade mark is more present with brushstrokes indicating paint mixed wet on wet. Producing this series Blau embraced his intuition and allowed for outcomes to be unpredictable, the result, an altogether new aesthetic. The works in Double Vision invite the viewer to engage with individual portions of the painted surface distinct from each other but integral to the compositional whole. In this sense the works present an allegorical idea of the world as whole only by precarious arrangements of smaller constituents.
Blau lives and works in Sydney. He has been exhibiting since the 1980s and his work is held in numerous public collections including The National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, Wollongong City Gallery and Artbank as well as corporate and private collections including The Baillieu Myer Collection of Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
