The Architecture of Light, King Street Gallery On William 21 October – 15 November, 2025

Silent World 2025 oil on linen 162 x 205cm

“The delicately evocative paintings featured in Adriane Strampp’s The Architecture of Light (2025) exhibition are largely autobiographical. Not only in the sense of their subject matter – set in or against the backdrop of her industrial, inner-city home and her parent’s country garden – but also through the incorporation of several genres of painting in the Western art tradition that she has explored at different times in her oeuvre: landscape, still life and the domestic interior. Over time, Strampp has orchestrated the painting of these subjects as a basis from which to build her own visual language and style, which is now on display at King Street Gallery on William.”
– Excerpt from Kirtsen Rann’s catalogue essay, 2025.

View catalogue here.

KING STREET GALLERY ON WILLIAM
177 William St, Darlinghurst
NSW 2010 AUSTRALIA
+61 2 9360 9727
art@kingstreetgallery.com

HOURS:
10am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday
Sunday by appointment

Where the Light Falls: Stories of the Everyday, Jan Manton Gallery 01 – 19 October 2024

Temporal space (and the weight of silence) 2024, oil on linen 163 x 204cm

Where the Light Falls: Stories of the Everyday

This new work explores the idea that human presence can be deeply felt, even when unseen. It invites the viewer to imagine the narratives and lives that unfold within quiet, intimate spaces, where the intangible presence of inhabitants lingers. Light plays a critical role as both witness and storyteller, illuminating remnants of daily life and drawing the viewer into the subtle drama of domestic interiors, where it reveals, conceals, and transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

As the philosopher and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated, “painting does not imitate the visible; it renders visible.” In this body of work, I investigate the interplay of light and shadow to reveal how the act of seeing conjures a world that exists in the tension between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknowable.

The theme of absence as presence has long been central to my practice. From the large-scale depictions of empty dresses in the late 1980s and 1990s to the empty roads and landscapes that followed, my work positions the viewer as a witness — someone who recognises, yet is separated from, familiar scenes. These works serve as reminders that we are always only the observer of others’ lives, not the participant, and can never know the full story.

This latest body of work is directly influenced by the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the prolonged lockdowns in Melbourne. Spending extended periods at home, I observed the changing qualities of light through the seasons and the ebb and flow of domestic life, both during the day and on restless nights, discovering a new landscape within my own walls.

Adriane Strampp
September 2024

View catalogue here.

JAN MANTON GALLERY
54 Vernon Terrace, Teneriffe
Qld 4005 Australia

HOURS:

Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm

In this Stillness, King Street Gallery on William, 9 August – 3 September 2022

Lucy’s Light 2022 oil on linen, 152 x 152cm

During Melbourne’s austere lockdowns, Adriane Strampp was restricted to her Collingwood home for months at a time, separated from her studio in Fitzroy. In this forced stillness, she has created a new series of work that turns toward the subject of the domestic interior as a site for contemplation, studying the light changing through the seasons, and night light reflections on restless nights.

View catalogue here.

KING STREET GALLERY ON WILLIAM
177 William St, Darlinghurst
NSW 2010 AUSTRALIA

HOURS:
10am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday
11am – 6pm Sunday

Pentimenti, Gallerysmith 3 Sep – 9 Oct 2021

Headland (Heart and Lungs) 2021 oil on linen 162 x 205cm

Strampp’s images are so delicately and finely layered onto linen, that if the light falls at a certain angle a glimpse of something tangible can appear, then leave without a trace. At other times roads, rivers, distant lights, smoke and other signs of life come into view through painted swathes of canvas that cast shadow or emanate light. These tricks with materials and brush are what make her work so compelling. In them exists an otherness between truth and fiction. Are these places real or conjured from the imagination?
Excerpt from essay by Marita Smith

Video of gallery installation with narrative by artist here. (3 minutes).

View catalogue here.

GALLERYSMITH
170-174 Abbotsford Street
North Melbourne
VIC 3051
AUSTRALIA

HOURS
TUES-SAT 11 AM – 5 PM

New Work – King Street Gallery on William, NSW 12 May 2020

1.29 pm to Paddington 2020, oil on linen, 152 x 152 cm

Due to COVID-19 Adriane Strampp’s exhibition scheduled to open at King Street Gallery on William on May 12 has been postponed and will be rescheduled to a later date.

A selection of new work has been sent to the gallery, and a digital catalogue is available. King Street Gallery is maintaining regular hours and work is available for viewing by appointment.

View catalogue here.
Artist statement: here.
Interview with Richard Morecroft here.

KING STREET GALLERY ON WILLIAM
177 William St, Darlinghurst
NSW 2010 AUSTRALIA

HOURS:

10am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday
11am – 6pm Sunday

Limen: Gallerysmith 21 June – 21 July

Image: Untitled #10 2018 oil on birch panel 20 x 25.5 cm

LIMEN

Latin limin-, limen

A threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguished from another

Strampp’s process begins with a collection of photographs, obscure and obscured source material, a compilation of information gathered from places once visited which continue to have some pull or gravitas.

Fragments of reference material are rearranged, merged and edited to create a new ambiguous reality and sense of discord, a response painted from the artist’s personal experiences and broader response to the present global climate.

There is also a playfulness with scale, small things are made monumental and the monumental represented in a small format, whilst the painterly process oscillates between depictions of the real and explorations of the material. Not all is always as it seems.

For all enquiries please contact: marita@gallerysmith.com.au | +61 3 9329 1860

GALLERYSMITH
170-174 Abbotsford Street
North Melbourne
VIC 3051
AUSTRALIA

HOURS
TUES-SAT 11 AM – 5 PM

Luxation: King Street Gallery on William 24 April – May 19 2018

strampp_adriane_hill crest l_luxation
Hill Crest l oil on linen 91 x 91 cm

Luxation 24 April – 19 May

This exhibition addresses themes of connection, dislocation and the pull to return to places once familiar. Coming from a peripatetic background there is a longing for familiarity and sameness however inevitably things are rarely as remembered.

Rather than the traditional art historical landscape, this work explores aspects of a landscape remembered or places once visited, the memory of which remains long after, and the shifting experience of revisiting as an outsider. The horses return as metaphor for the artists’s own restlessness and journeys of the past and of the future.

View PDF catalogue here.

For all enquiries contact: art@kingstreetgallery.com | +61 2 9360 9727

KING STREET GALLERY ON WILLIAM
177 William St, Darlinghurst
NSW 2010 AUSTRALIA

HOURS:

10am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday
11am – 6pm Sunday

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

Other Places: Gallerysmith 20 July – 26 August 2017

Adriane Strampp, Tracing Light, oil on linen, 152 x 152 cm
Adriane Strampp, Tracing Light, oil on linen, 152 x 152 cm

Using subtle shifts in tone and hue, Adriane Strampp’s nuanced paintings conjure familiar yet elusive memories of place, emotion and feeling. Her shadowy compositions, built from thin layers of oil and wax on linen, convey a paradox; being at once monumental and intimate, internal and external, familiar and foreign.

View catalogue here.

For all enquiries contact: marita@gallerysmith.com.au | +61 3 9329 1860

GALLERYSMITH
170-174 Abbotsford Street
North Melbourne
VIC 3051
AUSTRALIA

HOURS
TUES-SAT 11 AM – 5 PM

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