Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Relief, an exhibition of new works by Nick Selenitsch that marks a return to a more formal approach in his practice, while continue his interest in the spatial dimensions of urban environments.
Working across drawing and sculpture, Nick Selenitsch adapts the aesthetics and motifs of games, sports and civic markings to create open-ended visual systems that flirt ambiguously with the rules and procedures of their source; the results of which are something akin to maps of play.
Relief continues Selenitsch’s engagement with striking abstract forms, as seen in earlier works such as the temporary chalk drawings made on the streets of Frankston as part of his White Street Project Linemarking and the delicate, multi-coloured works on paper recently featured in Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing at Heide Museum of Modern Art. Such projects were inspired by spatial rule structures and the demarcation lines of sport fields, including four-square, tennis and hopscotch, as well as markings encountered on roads and parking lots.
While these previous chalk drawings and works on paper invited physical participation and exuded energy and playfulness-through vivid colour and their lightness of medium-this new series of quiet and elegant wall reliefs present an emphasis on aesthetics: they are meticulously created, with the precision of forms, juxtaposition of geometric shapes and colour, and the nuances of shadow, combining to create captivating sculptural abstractions. Selenitsch’s moments of “play” are here replaced with a sense of permanence, and an invitation to study and rediscover the aesthetics of the urban markings that surrounds us. Made at the same scale and with the same materials as urban planning models, Selenitsch understands this latest body of work as a proposition on how to divide space.
Artist’s profile