Stephen Bush Open the Boxoctosis

6 September –
4 October 2014

Stephen Bush

Ice Cream for Crow

, 2014
Oil and enamel on linen
183 x 183 cm

Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Open the Boxoctosis, an exhibition of new works by Stephen Bush. Following on the heels of Steenhuffel, The Vizard Foundation Award exhibition presented by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, the collected works encompassing Open the Boxoctosis mines the archive of Bush’s pictorial illusionism.

For Bush, the landscape in these paintings read as a pointed metaphor that speaks to our increasingly frayed relationship to the environment. The depicted views continue to seduce and disturb. Inhabited by costumed participants and icons of visual culture, Bush’s figures confuse easy readings of time, place, and meaning. Their considered presence also draws attention to Bush’s ongoing explorations of pictorial style. In his paintings, contradictions abound. Modernist design commingles with démodé narrators, and dilapidated structures overhaul their futile utility.

Regeneration and transformation share duality with the images depicted and the physical material itself in its fluid, dripped, pooled, brushed and scraped state. For Bush, the act of painting is one of ponder, revision and improvisation.

Bush has exhibited extensively in Australia and the USA since 1984. Highlights include a survey exhibition at The Ian Potter Museum, University of Melbourne, in 2014, his participation in Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, USA, in 2008, and a major solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe in 2007. Other recent exhibitions include VOLTA Art Fair, New York, USA, 2012; Club soda unbridled, Sutton Gallery, 2012; Marie Celeste, Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, 2011; and Contemporary Encounters, The Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, 2010. Bush’s work is held in all of Australia’s major state galleries and numerous prestigious private collections including BHP Billiton, Melbourne; Commonwealth Bank Collection, Sydney; Michael Buxton Collection, Melbourne; Museum of Old & New Art (MONA), Hobart; Wesfarmers Collection, Perth; and Western Mining, Melbourne. He is the only resident Australian painter featured in Phaidon’s current major publication ‘Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting’. Bush recently undertook the prestigious Green Street Studio Residency, New York, in January through to March 2012.

Artist’s profile