Though Martin Basher is an unabashed producer of beautiful, incandescent pictures, an undercurrent of unease has long run through his practice, much of it focussed on the gossamer currents of desire and longing that weave together our increasingly consumerist lives. Indeed, across this suite of new work, Basher has reached for spaces of pictorial precarity, wrangling images of intense poise and tension, of a tenuous, crystalline depiction of nature that suggests how far we already are from a world of balance and equilibrium. Just as the pandemic saw the foundations of the world were being tested, he says, ‘so too my practice, my understandings of form and surface, of content and really, my very assumptions of the world itself’. And this new work has been born of these unstable times. Incorporating the gradient-based abstractions Basher is best known for, while pushing out into new territories of figuration, the exhibition takes his work into places the artist describes as some of the most ‘pictorially challenging, tenuous, interesting and exhausting I’ve been in for years.’īasher weathered most of a tumultuous 2020 living and working in New York City, his adopted home for the last 20 years. Large-scale paintings build graphic layers of hard-edged and linear botanical shapes into stark, sumptuous forms hovering somewhere between floral still-life - that traditional genre of painting steeped in allegory and moral contemplation - and hybridised, layered abstraction. Martin Basher’s latest solo exhibition at Starkwhite introduces a new body of work to a New Zealand audience.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |