Frontsidefrontreflectivefrontsidefront

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BACKGROUND This project is located in the field of concrete art, in particular painting seeking to foreground perceptual complexity. This debate is current in programs of Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt and Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst Reutlingen. Building on concerns in material abstraction, this installation asks: In what ways can the materiality of painting be brought into perceptive space through a foregrounding of fronts and sides of works, and extending painted space into installation?
CONTRIBUTION Frontsidefrontreflectivefrontsidefront is an integrated painting installation and exhibition with Dr Christoph Dahlhausen. Conceived and executed collaboratively, we contributed paintings on opposite sides of the wall, experimented with & installed a reflective ground in order to activate the entire gallery. My new paintings, Flip Flip (2020) with blank fronts and painted sides were created to counter Dahlhausen's paintings. Our contribution is to develop painting schema that thematise the divergence between front and side, figure and ground, depth and surface. We developed an installation treatment that further complicates painting perception through a reflective treatment of the walls. The experience of each group of paintings is re-rendered in experiential space, so to develop a perpetually recurring movement of attention extrapolating the painting structure into spatial perception.
SIGNIFICANCE Both the collaborative installation and my Flip Flip series interplay the painted surface with each others' stencilled edge, foregrounding both in performative ways within a collaborative setting. Dr Dahlhausen is a collaborator of major international standing with over 35 solo shows in European museums. The exhibition was selected upon competitive proposal at Australia's premier non-objective peer reviewed gallery Five Walls, a program of international excellence presenting for example Dr David Sequeira and Professor David Cross.