Brett Colquhoun Passage

1 – 29 March 2025

Sutton Gallery is delighted to present, Passage, an exhibition of new work by Brett Colquhoun. Through an absorbing suite of thirteen paintings, the artist couples the climactic moment of an aircraft landing onto the runway with the jolting sensation between sleep and consciousness.

Captured in real time, the images reference Colquhoun’s snapshots of the built-in livestream recording a plane’s underbelly mid-flight. Revealing itself as a framework through which the artist’s interest in ontological shifts may take shape, the glaring imagery in this series conjures the sudden awakening sensation known as a ‘hypnic jerk’. These episodic renderings reiterate the form of the plane to a point of near-visual collapse and total abstraction, as layers of acrylic enmesh the material world within a dilated and dreamlike surrounding. Reverberating lights from the tarmac cast lurid beams upon the plane’s undercarriage, with distortions ensuing between fore and background to create impressionistic, almost hallucinatory effects clouding their industrial reality.

Colquhoun yields an unerring sense of tension through the repetition of this motif. His new paintings function as conduits to a purely perceptual apprehension of the environment, whereby iconography functions as a red herring to avert a straight or symbolic reading of subject matter. Ideas of transition between states and times is integral to Passage, as the binaries of completion and conception or genesis and resolution are explored at length. Whether finding ways to articulate shifts between presence and absence, image and reality, wakefulness and slumber, Colquhoun traces imperceptible shifts, and alludes to that which remains unseen.

To celebrate the opening of Passage, please join us at Sutton Gallery on Friday 28th February, from 6–8pm.

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Artist Biography

Brett Colquhoun’s paintings explore momentary shifts and transitions within both natural and artificial environments. Quiet gestures underscore defined vignettes as Colquhoun paints with an airiness and dexterity that bridges the chasm between the internal and external world. Incremental variances of form and perception emerge freely through a phenomenological enquiry into themes of absence, presence, and memory.

Colquhoun’s subjects often invoke a symbolist quality to encircle shifts in being, depicting impressions such as the striking of a match, residual mark of a fingerprint, the imminent landing of an aeroplane, the violent thrashing of a lightning bolt, the vestigial mark of breath on a window, or the radiant passage of moonlight. Constantly searching for ways to both articulate and abstract the manifold interpretations of human existence from the micro to the macrolevel, Colquhoun produces profound moments of introspection whereby figurative elements offer a conduit to timeless concerns.

Brett Colquhoun (b. 1958, Albury, NSW) has exhibited widely across Australia since 1982. Throughout the 1980s, Colquhoun held exhibitions at pivotal Australian arts institutions and galleries including Art Projects, 200 Gertrude (now Gertrude Contemporary) and Pinacotheca. His work has been shown in significant surveys of contemporary Australian art, including the 1^st Adelaide Biennial (Art Gallery of South Australia, 1990), Perspecta (1983, Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Phenomena 1: New Painting in Australia (2001, Art Gallery of New South Wales), among additional exhibitions at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, and the Bendigo Art Gallery.

Examples of his work are found in institutions across Australia, including the National Gallery of Art, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Geelong Gallery, Geelong, among others.

Artist’s profile