Mark Galea: Recent Works
Install image of Mark Galea:Recent Works
Twenty small paintings that experiment with colour by Mark Galea will be on display at the Albert Street Gallery Brunswick from 22-29 November.
Mark Galea lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, and has exhibited widely both in Victoria and interstate and many of his works are held in public and private collections across Australia. His practice is marked by a fascination for the square and the cube. Working across small and large-scale projects, Galea’s celebrated practice explores the principals of movement, colour and motion through sculpture, painting and installation.
This new body of work, comprising twenty small scale paintings, continues Galea’s investigation of the colour spectrum and the chromatic possibilities of translucent layers of colour applied in various
combinations.
Inspired by the process and sequence-based art of artists like Sol LeWitt and Ad Reinhardt, Galea has previously created paintings by following a rotational sequence in which sixteen colours, evenly dispersed through the spectrum, were applied to a series of panels in the same order but starting in a different corner of the panel each time. The first colour was applied to the upper left corner of the first panel and to the upper right of the second panel. Working clockwise, the second colour was applied to the upper right corner of the first panel and the lower right of the second, and so on.
This new series however, Galea has applied each layer of colour randomly. “The colours are always numbered, but this time I used small, numbered cards which correlated to the sixteen colours, and spilt them onto the table top to determine the sequence in which the colours of paint were applied. I am very attuned to colour and the way different tones combine, so the real challenge in making these paintings was to overcome my expectations and resist the urge to correct the randomly- specified order.
“This expansion of a familiar process by playfully varying the colour sequence is very sustaining. Replacing the logical with something more random produces remarkable subtleties within each painting and for me, each work is new and always surprising.” – Mark Galea