Sutton Gallery is excited to present Here it is, a new exhibition by Stephen Bush highlighting the artists’ dedicated studio practice and cyclical approach to painting. Comprising forty-seven artworks including a selection of cityscapes, bold colour pencil drawings, gouache, and oil paintings. Transpiring from a period of deep reflection and signaling a shift toward simplicity and resourcefulness, these artworks are informed by the artist’s enduring engagement with image construction, philosophy, music, and art history.

Bush often works within self-imposed limitations that include material, procedural or conceptual constraints that shape and propel his practice. This methodology has long been a notable feature of his work and is evident in earlier series such as the Lure of Paris, in which the same image was painted thirty-five times, or the Venetian Red suite of works created using a single tube of paint, among others. For the artist, employing limits is the creative engine of his practice, enabling bodies of work that are simultaneously pared back and ambitious. In Here It Is the artist continues to employ generative restrictions, the entire DVM series is made with a single brush, and throughout the exhibition most works feature the common elements or motifs albeit reconfigured seemingly ad infinitum.

Beyond simply focusing on process, technique and the realities of the self and lived experience that inevitably underpins the artworks on view, a philosophical questioning emerges for the artist. In this sense, the Ecstasy of Erasure series is both a reference to a song lyric, and philosophy. According to some ancient Greek philosophers, the term ‘ecstasy’signifies a state of being outside oneself or transcending ordinary experience to achieve heightened consciousness or a union with the divine other. Philosophers such as Plato, Plotinus, and Heidegger explored ecstatic states as moments of profound connection, spiritual insight, or fundamental to the way humans exist – a means of standing out from their immediate circumstances. However, Bush acknowledges that in the postmodern, post-religious era, pursuing a state of ecstasy can be dangerous particularly if sought through extreme behaviour, and is drawn to it precisely because it is profoundly uncertain.

The cyclical and reflective nature of Bush’s practice is exemplified in the dialogue between two paintings, Five AM (1981) and You, the living #2 (2025), each depicting the same 1980s Melbourne shopfront. After rediscovering the original reference photo, he noticed his reflection was captured in the shop window, a detail omitted from the original painting. Now more than four decades later, he decided to paint the image once again although this time include the incidental self-portrait, establishing a type of exchange between past and present. This temporal resonance extends beyond the canvas to the exhibition space itself, where studio artefacts such as paint-splattered carpet and speakers, chronicle decades of creative labour and gently connects the intimacy of the studio to the gallery.

Here it is, illuminates an artist who has sustained his practice by a desire to question, seek and assess a vast range of material for imagery worthy of becoming art. This process of exploration results in artworks that operate as a stage where memory, imagination, and art-historical dialogue play out.