Since its establishment in 1984, the Charles Nodrum Gallery’s exhibition program embraces a diversity of media and styles - from painting, sculpture & works on paper to graphics and photography; from figurative, geometric, gestural, surrealist & social comment to installation & conceptually based work.
— Catalogue Essay by Kate Nodrum
This exhibition is available online only at this stage.
We'll be happy to provide further images of works, set up video calls to 'walk' clients through the gallery, and to discuss any further queries by phone (03 9427 0140) or email (gallery@charlesnodrumgallery.com.au)
Sinuous spheres. Not only a reference to the three tondo paintings in this exhibition, and the viewer’s desire to walk in circles around all of these new works to figure out their geometry and catch their colour shifts, but also to the twisted globe on which we live. “My compositions are getting more and more complicated”, Adamson-Pinczewski says, “But you know what Kate, life is complicated.” The challenges we face today are intense - socially, politically, environmentally, psychologically, metaphysically. Despite this, these new works by Samara Adamson-Pinczewski are labours of love by an artist who is forever absorbing new information and exploring new ground.
The newest ground in this exhibition is the sculpture. They are 3-D printed resin, hand painted. Her transition from two to three dimensions didn’t come as a surprise to me, particularly after the shaped paintings in her 2018 exhibition – all clearly bursting at the seams to pop right off the wall and into the round. But it was a trip to France in 2016 when she visited a number of Le Corbusier’s buildings, as well as the 1966 brutalist Church of St. Bernadette du Banlay – a church-cum-bunker filled with oblique angles and elegant curves - that really got Samara’s mind primed to work towards sculpture. Then all she needed was some incentive and a deadline – which she got in the Spring 1883 Art Fair in Sydney in 2019. The three works in this exhibition continue her ‘Around the Corner’ series, the first three of which were much admired at Spring and all sold. These new works (as did their siblings) resist an immediate visual digestion: you can’t just ‘get it’ on your first look, you want to move around the thing to find the front and, when you realise there isn’t one, you need some more time for your brain to figure out all the intricacies and delights of the highly involved forms. While making these sculptures, Samara has been pondering how she would do things on a larger scale – and she is open to the task, should an opportunity arise. She’s also been thinking about how the sculptures would behave in space – possibly as mobiles.
Previous visits to the DIA Foundation in upstate New York (during her residency with The Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts) were also highly influential. She tells me that Richard Serra’s father was a shipbuilder, and Frank Stella’s father a house painter; ‘it’s in your blood’, she says, obviously feeling an affinity to these artists, as her art too comes from the family profession and is driven by the materials she’s grown up with. In her case, her psychology and her art are formed by bits of scrap metal (her parents and grandmother ran a scrap metal business from the late 60s) hence her aluminium supports, her iridescent and metallic paints and the spiky forms of her compositions.
As for the tondos - their internal geometry is complex, and she has worked hard to avoid copying or echoing the circle shape of the support within the composition, instead pursuing the irregular. The result, as with the paintings on canvas, are works of a highly edited nature, aggressive and jarring. But this is her intention: nothing is static about Samara’s work - neither the forms in her compositions, the participation of the viewer, nor the work of the artist herself.
Kate Nodrum, July 2020