SUMMER EXHIBITION REVIEWED BY DAN RULE IN ‘THE AGE’, SATURDAY 23 JANUARY 2016
By Nicholas Thompson | January 23, 2016 | Comments Off on SUMMER EXHIBITION REVIEWED BY DAN RULE IN ‘THE AGE’, SATURDAY 23 JANUARY 2016
“There’s plenty to like about this happily crammed group show of (chiefly) paintings at Nicholas Thompson Gallery. One of Melbourne’s new generation of younger gallerists, Thompson isn’t afraid to search beyond the stocks of fashionable local artists in their early-mid career – or indeed his own postcode – to fill his gallery space. And it certainly shows here, with a clutch of quality paintings spanning various styles, modes and iterations. There are his go-to artists, including senior Sydney-based painter Alun Leach-Jones, who offers up a lively conglomeration of flat, colour forms that speak to cubism as much as they do abstraction. Christian Flynn’s Soft Serve Revival – a luridly hued painting that draws upon fluid, almost cellular forms – reads almost like a bust, albeit drowns on colourful goo. Young artist Miles Hall impresses with a compact painting in two parts – a flurry of loose, black gestures that rise from a panel of solid, textured pink, while Iain Dean’s monochrome screenprint captures the female form as a kind of busty ghoul, both hypnotising and troubling in her primitivistic guise.”
