Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Piece by piece, a group exhibition that brings together painting and sculpture by artists Hugo Blomley, Amanda Marburg, Madeleine Peters and Peter Robinson. This intergenerational presentation highlights four artists who distil, condense and reenact moments of transformation through a distinctive material process and idiosyncratic visual language. The ongoing reiteration of form and serial-nature of display in this exhibition fosters an environment of blurred associations or disconnections, whereby the proposed motifs may – or may not – have been dragged away from original referents. Moments and concepts are slightly varying each time, slowly reinventing their signification. It is through this sense of reconstruction that the artworks in Piece by piece begin to open new ideas about the enduring resonance of form and the shortcomings of memory.

In Amanda Marburg’s ‘Chicken Paintings’ a cast of uncanny characters emerge. The artist’s assembly of enigmatic roosters and cockerels are rendered in her signature visual idiom, first casting figurines in plasticine before depicting these models on board. Characterised by a familiarity with and affection for the subject, Marburg gleans inspiration from significant portrayals of poultry produced throughout western history painting dating as far back at the 17^th century. Any historical or socio-political context surrounding the original works referenced is dislocated as she inserts each bird into her own uncanny aesthetic realm of whimsy and fantasy. This process forgoes hierarchical and temporal distinction, instead attending to the physical properties of each subject and their respective configuration.

Peter Robinson’s Defunct Mnemonics (2012) are emblematic of the Aotearoa’s based practitioner’s continued interest in subverting the authority of sculpture through material investigation. These linear pole sculptures both extend and foreshorten their repeated abstract pattern, making reference to their own repetitious and process-led construction. Consisting of a central wooden dowel encased in individual rolls of felt, each pole reiterates their relationship to their environment through varying texture, thickness, length and colour. Described as “memory devices”, Robinson’s concentrated and tactile process elicits the woodworking practices found in a traditional Māori context, through which ceremonial staffs that are activated by touch serve as prompts for memory recall. As the title would suggest, these artworks fail to catalyse instantaneous recollection, instead encouraging measured observation of latent stories and associations without conclusion.

Madeleine Peters’ work Catherine’s Handstand (2023) is a sequential reproduction of a decades-old piece of home-video footage. Translated across 48 consecutive oil paintings, the work considers painting as a devotional act fulfilled through repetition and ritual. Individually discernible hatches of oil paint render a grainy moving image across scores of panels as Peters vignettes each frame with a patient diligence. In doing so, the artist problematises the relationship between the captured image and its physical reproduction.

Hugo Blomely’s series Regressions (2024) features four perforated vessels of modest stature that punctuate the gallery as idle satellites. The artist’s hard-edged sculptures thwart simple recognition, invoking the sincere and frugal aesthetics of machinery while vaguely suggesting a science-fiction akin corporeality. Each sculpture harnesses negative space to scrutinize the properties of mass and volume that characterise three-dimensional form. Here, this paucity of internal detail suggests a hazy provenance or ahistoricity, whereby each sculpture transmits an evocation of an undigested past while presaging an unprepared future, positing a patched-together account of an unverifiable act.