Lot 10

Station Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Esther Stewart: Timeshare, Station Gallery, Melbourne, 28 March - 18 April 2015

"Balustrades or beds, off centre; just blocked colour, whacked and slightly shifted. These 10 panels are unmistakably works by Esther Stewart. Here her intuitive geometries leave from Sim city for the tiles of an elaborate Escher palace missing the illusion. Repositioned and/or refined, Stewart's work in hard-edged abstraction comes through enamel and object painting and now appears at its flattest, thickest in vibrant acrylic. The history of geometric painting, an avant-garde become tradition, is coded: the notion of Cartesian space is projected against a wall of hypocrisy. Many leave it at that-the minimal object literalises the space, its novel negativity exploding the gestalt threshold between art and life. Stewart's paintings do not follow this overly formalised and ultimately hubristic logic however, the abstraction surfs a different ambiguity." (excerpt, exhibition statement)