Pilgrimage: Hill Smith Gallery 21 October – 18 November 2017

strampp-adriane-departure-pilgrimage
Departure 2017 oil on linen 91 x 91 cm

In this latest collection of new work by Melbourne artist Adriane Strampp, Pilgrimage expands on the artist’s ongoing interest in connection, memory and spatial relationships, and in particular, our relationship to particular places or things meaningful to us. How do we remember the places we once knew? Fragments of memories reconstituted to a fluid fusion of elements that we recall, pieced together to recreate a new reality, landscapes made of multiple locations creating a universal sense of familiarity. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,(1910), Rilke compares the collation of memories to the house:

I never saw this strange dwelling again. Indeed, as I see it now, the way it appeared to my child’s eye, it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect the two rooms, but is conserved in me in a fragmentary form. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonial slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins.

Whilst continuing an ongoing interest in the landscape in terms of revisiting of places once familiar, Pilgrimage includes a more intimate look at connection through the interiors and personal possessions of other artists’ homes and studios. Both the interior and external landscapes take the position of observer separated by subtle barriers, shadows, reflections or distance, a reminder that we can only ever be the observer, not the participant in other people’s places.

View catalogue here.

Artist Louise Feneley will be showing concurrently with her exhibition Into the Sea.
Catalogue of both exhibitions can be viewed here.

For all enquiries contact: hsg@hillsmithgallery.com.au | +61 8 8223 6558

HILL SMITH GALLERY
113 Pirie Street, Adelaide,
SA 5000
Australia

HOURS
WED-FRI 10 AM – 5 PM
SAT 2 – 5 PM

Passages of Time: Hill Smith Gallery 27 April – 20 May


Brume 2012 oil on linen 152 x 152 cm

 

Hill Smith Gallery

113 Pirie Street

Adelaide

South Australia 5000

 

 

Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5.30pm

Sunday 2-5pm

 

 

 

Passages of Time is Adriane Strampp’s first exhibition in Adelaide since 1999, and is an overview of recent work. It includes paintings from both the horse and landscape series as well as several drawings.

Strampp’s new work continues to explore the poetic and the romantic, whilst at the same time referencing elements of her earlier work. Over the last six years Strampp has reduced her palette to quiet greys built of many thin washes of colour, creating a sense of stillness and shadow, reinforcing her interest in both spatial relationships, surface materiality and the presence of absence.

As a result her landscapes have become ethereal and ambiguous, their haziness leaves the viewer uncertain of what they are seeing – trees in the mist or shadows suspended in particles of light, they appear familiar but not specific. The statues refer to her early and popular dress series, weathered and sometimes damaged they remain strong and heroic, a contemplation of mortality and fallen ideals. The animals she chooses to draw and paint are often vulnerable, yet they too carry a stoic, if guarded strength.

There is a sense of timelessness in this new work, and a sense of maturation as Strampp attempts to address the importance of connection and communication through her work.

Painthing (as one): AEAF 16 April – 5 May 2010

Equus
Adriane Strampp Equus 2008 oil on cotton paper 100x490 cm
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Lion Arts Centre, North Tce [West End] Adelaide South Australia
Tuesday – Friday 11am-5pm
Saturday 2-5pm

Artists have been invited to respond to seven considerations regarding the compelling nature of painting. The title refers to the whole of this exhibition as constituting a discreet body of ‘painting’, one that might inclusively construct, amongst other things, a local constellation. This constellation might then be referred to as ‘painting’, and be located within a local universe called ‘art’; in time this constellation might become known, but probably only to its very particular inhabitants, as the ‘painthing constellation’.

Painting. Painting, pain thing: painthing. Maybe this has happened to you too; you’re driving along a suburban street or you’re reading the label on the back of a tin of crushed tomatoes somewhere in a dim corner of a supermarket and suddenly a word, actually any word but this time it’s this word, gets caught on the sieve-like structure that divides your perception of ordinary action from an extraordinary something. Immediately the word as-it-is jumps out at you and you see it in its entire absurdity, its un-meaning, its limp body superimposed on the frenetic buzziness of the universal attraction and repulsion going on all around you. Then you begin to examine it, prod it for signs of its former life. Nothing. Something very surprising suddenly happens; its body becomes slowly absorbed into the phrenesis of action and reaction, memory and meaning, membrane and pulsing core. It continues to offer itself to this whole until the shape you once knew emerges elsewhere as another; different, but somehow the same. And then you try and understand (what else can you do, you’re stuck in a long check-out queue) how this word-—this painful thing actually—can simultaneously be both itself and other. You look around; people are still in the queue, shelves still stacked, fluoros still buzzing, cars still silently gliding by outside, tired smiles still being offered. And then you realize that almost everything (you think almost because somehow you feel it cannot be quite this absolute) is both itself and some other thing; inalienably itself, yet distantly other. Is a constellation like that? Are the celestial bodies and dust particles that form it simply an infinite collection of collections of otherness, each component offering a kaleidoscopic fragment of the whole, yet each simultaneously desiring both breathless proximity and vast expansive space in which to, utterly and defiantly, be that one thing it feels itself to be? And, what of breathless proximity? Ah, that, the as one-ness thing. I can’t speak of that. It’s not in my nature, I resolutely surmise, as I get to the check-out just in time.

Domenico de Clario, AEAF director

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