Adriane Strampp is a finalist in The John Leslie Art Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious and valuable prizes for contemporary landscape painting. With a first prize of $20,000 (non-acquisitive) the Prize consistently attracts the highest calibre of artists working in Australia. An additional prize of $1,000 will be given to the best Gippsland work. The Prize is made possible through the generous ongoing support of the Gallery’s Patron, John Leslie OBE.
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.
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.
Adriane Strampp is returning again this year to Art Central with Hill Smith Gallery for Hong Kong Art Week, along with gallery artists Melinda Schawel and Yanni Floros. Art Central will feature over 100 leading international galleries, 75% of which hail from the Asia Pacific.The Fair’s extensive gallery line-up will showcase striking works from across the globe, illustrating the diversity and prodigious talent of artists within today’s contemporary art market.
Adriane Strampp explores the theme of the Romantic landscape, the intangible and the evocative, the search for a sense of place, and the desire for connection, a reflection of her own peripatetic background. Interest is not in the mimetic representation of landscape, but rather the suggestion and presence of the viewer observing, present yet separated from that which he sees. It traces both the literal and the emotional journey of a landscape remembered, the search for familarity, and explores triggers that help us connect the past with the present.
This Wild Song is holding a silent auction to help support an exhibition of contemporary artworks by 23 Australian female artists in Singapore at the Australian High Commission. The exhibition is timed to coincide with International Women’s Day in March of 2018. Over 40 Australian female artists have donated works to help support this project, and works are currently on view at Gallerysmith and bidding online ends at 3 pm Saturday 3rd Feb.
This Wild Song (TWS) is a series of portraits and interviews with Australian women visual artists who have a unique voice.
The theme of the portraits is for the artist to become a part of their work. The photographs also hold the intention of creating an honest and true depiction of who the artist is as a person. Every portrait has a specific concept created for the artist, and significance is placed on all elements within the photograph in relation to the artist and their practice.
TWS celebrates the strong female leaders in the arts community. Although the artists being featured are from varying backgrounds, use a diverse range of mediums, and at different stages of their arts career; they are unified by their unique voices and distinct style. The inclusion of so many artistic mediums in TWS offers a broad synopsis of contemporary Australian art.
Flash 2016 pigment and wax on cradled board, 30 x 30 cm
Exhibition: 30th January – 3rd February
Curator tour: 1st February 12:30-1:30pm
Closing event: 3rd Feb 1-3pm Silent auction ends 3rd Feb, 3pm
A richly explorative exhibition of contemporary Australian landscapes by 40 leading artists of diverse cultural backgrounds from around Australia.
Featuring:
• Aboriginal and contemporary Australian artists
• 90 + paintings, ochres, barks, works on paper and 3D
• Intimate views of the Mornington Peninsula by John Anderson created for the exhibition
• New coastal and Lake Mungo paintings by David Beaumont
• FNQ forest and sandbeach abstracts by Rosella Namok, Claudine Marzik and Fiona Omeenyo
• Textured ochres from the Kimberley’s Warmun Arts
• Organic mixed media boards by emerging Tasmanian artist Jillian Catto
• Elegant abstracts by Sue Lovegrove and Adriane Strampp
• Lushly hued paintings of the Pilbara’s salt lake country by Bugai Whyoulter
• Award winning artists of the APY Lands Freda Brady, Robert Fielding and more
• Lush new paintings by energing artists including the APY’s Rachael Lionel, Betty Chimney, Kerry Anne
Robinson and Janie Kulyuru Lewis, the Kimberley’s Lindsay Malay & Yuendumu’s Steven Jupurrula
Nelson
• Unique ceramic Bagu firemaker figures of FNQ
• Views of central Victoria and the NSW coast by Neville Pilven and Sally West
• Limited edition prints by street artist and printmaker Tom Civi and master printmaker Martin King
and much more…
Plus feature exhibition of the subtle paintings of the artists of Papunya Tjupi – inheritors of the founding Papunya school of Western Desert art.
We are also delighted to continue our partnerships with other representative galleries – Australian Galleries, Gallerysmith and Salt Contemporary Art – who join us in making available an exciting range of work by leading artists.
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.
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.
Gallerysmith is participating in Denfair with three artists, Adriane Strampp, Isobel Clement and Kirrily Hammond. Details here.
DENFAIR is a boutique trade event and the leading destination for contemporary design in Australia. Held over three days in Melbourne, DENFAIR delivers the very best brands to their customers within a stimulating environment of discovery and inspiration.
Playing with form and figure, Uneasy Idyll presents four artists who explore the ambiguous and sometimes uncanny relationship between aspects of the land and the figure.
Adriane Strampp Dissolve 2017 oil on linen 91 x 91 cm
On exhibition currently at Hill Smith Gallery as part of Art Central Hong Kong, the gallery has selected four artists from the South side of Australia – Deidre But-Husaim (SA), Matt R. Martin (VIC), Shannon Smiley (VIC) and Adriane Strampp (VIC). Whilst distinct in their own practices, each artist plays with the emotion of the figure or the landscape and the potential connection this can hold with the viewer.
Deidre But-Husaim is known for her diverse works, focused upon the very nature of looking and making rather than solely the concept. Thus her works range from depicting people experiencing a work of art or might be purely an investigation into a phenomenon of nature.
Whilst Deidre switches between man and nature, Matt R. Martin is focussed purely on the subtle nuances of human gesture. Stemming from his mother’s passion for classical ballet, he continues a love for the capability of the human form. His works present the body in strange formations and orientations, reconstructing and depicting body language.
Shifting the gaze to the landscape Adriane Strampp paints tale of the Romantic landscape. Lyrically abstract, there is a sense of an in-between or passing time in her transient works. Strong washes of colour vary in tone across the canvas, painting an emotional narrative. In subtle contrast Shannon Smiley is drawn to the rough and cheeky urban setting – depicting a landscape where nature has taken back over the city. There is a tension between the natural and man-made that Smiley encourages, with the centre of the metropolis presented as unruly and overgrown.
Somewhere between curious ambiguity and painterly detail, look forward to evocative works that present settings that are both strange yet familiar.
EXHIBITION Uneasy Idyll Until 25 March 2017 Hill Smith Gallery at Art Central Hong Kong Central Harbourfront Hong Kong
Courtesy the artists and Hill Smith Gallery, Hong Kong
