BLOCKPROJECTS 23/7/25 BLOCKPROJECTS 23/7/25

the distance between then & now: james clayden, sydney nolan, david thomas, jenny watson, fred williams

The Distance Between Then & Now

09.07.25 - 02.08.25

BLOCKPROJECTS presents The Distance Between Then and Now, a cross-generational exhibition curated by artist and gallerist Jeremy Kibel.

Here, time is not measured in years but in layers of memory, perception, and material. Bringing together five Australian artists, Jenny Watson, James Clayden, Fred Williams, Sidney Nolan, and David Thomas, the exhibition showcases works that span decades yet share a sustained engagement with the temporal nature of image-making.

Each artist navigates time in distinct ways: through autobiographical symbolism, gestural abstraction, reimagined landscape, or conceptual stillness. This is not a historical survey, but a meditation on how the past continues to shape the present and how painting can hold that continuity.

James Clayden, whose practice spans painting, experimental cinema, theatre, and music, contributes his monumental triptych Morning Window #1, #2, #3 (each 244 × 122 cm). Dense and immersive, these works hover between presence and dissolution. Writing on Clayden’s 2020 exhibition at BLOCKPROJECTS, critic Adrian Martin described his painting as “a game of fleeting projection and recognition... the eternal mystery of the horizon.” In Clayden’s hands, that horizon is less a boundary than a zone of psychological tension where form dissolves, re-emerges, and remains suspended.

Fred Williams’s Fallen Tree (1966) is a compact yet commanding painting in which the Australian bush is orchestrated with precision. Dominant vertical trunks are interrupted by the angled fall of a single gum, all framed within a circular composition that asserts quiet structural control. Williams once remarked that when the landscape offered “no focal point,” it had to be built into the paint. In Fallen Tree, the circle becomes a point that concentrates the eye and resolves the visual tension between vertical, diagonal, and horizontal movement.

What might in life appear unremarkable, a tree downed among others, becomes, through colour, compression, and painterly texture, an event of perception. Bark emerges through dragged pigment; the ground lifts gently toward a clear horizon. The everyday becomes extraordinary. The painting reads like a chord: upright trunks sustain the rhythm, the fallen tree cuts across it like an interval, and the horizon holds the final note. It’s a work that evokes “the seeing of sound and the sound of seeing” a synaesthetic charge common to Williams’s most poetic abstractions. Exhibited in Dealer’s Choice at Rudy Komon Gallery in January 1968, Fallen Tree stands as a pivotal expression of Williams’s evolving formal language.

Sidney Nolan’s Parkville (1944–45), a rarely seen early work, offers a lyrical portrait of wartime Melbourne suburbia. With softened contours and flattened perspective, the work captures not topographical specificity, but the mood of a moment. Formerly held by the Sidney Nolan Trust and exhibited at ICA London in 1962, Parkville trades the theatrical intensity of the Ned Kelly series for a quieter, more introspective atmosphere where houses, trees, and telegraph poles settle into a gently pulsing rhythm.

Jenny Watson’s Anointing (1991), first exhibited at Annina Nosei Gallery in New York, is a symbolic, intimate work rendered on fabric. Pairing stylised figuration with diaristic text, Watson’s visual language, shaped by feminist discourse and punk sensibility, transforms lived experience into archetype. Her paintings blur the line between confession and construction, where memory becomes a shared, visual script.

David Thomas’s Untitled (1990-1991), exhibited publicly for the first time, was painted during his residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Modest in scale and meditative in tone, the work reflects Thomas’s sustained inquiry into perception, light, and temporality. “I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to revisit these earlier pieces from my younger days,” he reflects not with nostalgia, but with renewed presence. This quiet painting rewards slow looking, offering a stillness that lingers beyond the canvas.

While diverse in approach, what unites these five artists is not a shared movement or moment, but a profound commitment to painting as a durational, meaning-making act. Their works resist spectacle and urgency, instead favouring depth, return, and resonance.

As Jeremy Kibel observes: “This exhibition is not about nostalgia. It’s about what persists what painting still carries after everything else has passed.”

Each work here reflects a lifelong dedication to painting not as a performance or product, but as a process. These are not images designed for quick consumption or instant affirmation. They are shaped through quiet attention: to place, to material, to memory. And it is within that space between intention and perception, between then and now, that something enduring continues to unfold.

ARTWORKS:

enquire.

BLOCKPROJECTS 14/6/25 BLOCKPROJECTS 14/6/25

STEMS by One Three Collective: features work by artists Alison Kennedy, Andrew Gunnell, Belinda Reid, David McBurney and Mark Dustin.

STEMS by One Three Collective

11.06.25 - 05.07.25

STEMS by One Three Collective

STEMS features work by artists Alison Kennedy, Andrew Gunnell, Belinda Reid, David McBurney and Mark Dustin. This inaugural exhibition of One Three Collective presents an experimental framework where individual artists are invited to contribute, and then interpret, a pool of shared source imagery. Working with print-informed methods to disassemble and reassemble this information, the project explores the finitude and collective location of images in a shared visual world.

Experimental print project One Three Collective operates with the simple provocation that working collaboratively opens new perspectives. This approach, inviting chance and surprise, is implicit in the project title where one doesn’t always lead to two—but rather, with collaboration, might sometimes leap to three.

The project is an open, creative opportunity rather than a closed collection of participants. Primarily an experimental print project, the Collective depends on a group of two or more artists agreeing to collaborate, and the members of the group can vary as the project is iteratively engaged. For instance, the Collective’s pilot outcome included just two artists, but this current iteration involves five printmakers, all collaborating to create STEMS.

To maintain coherence the project runs to a set of guidelines:

Gather two or more artists critically engaged with printmaking.
Choose a word prompt to serve as a conceptual starting point.
Invite each participating artist to source and contribute one high-resolution image from the internet in response to the word prompt.
Each artist works with at least two of the collected images and creates an individual outcome from each.
Outcomes that originate from a shared source image are exhibited together.

On a practical level, this framework offers opportunity to create fresh outcomes without continually needing to invent new scenarios. On a conceptual level, inviting multiple artists to collaborate on shared source material offers a method to explore perspectives on one of print’s functional roles: the movement of image information from place to place, from person to person, and from time to time.

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For any artist experienced with printerly image reproduction, this project acknowledges a shared enjoyment, frustration, appreciation, and required control of technical production. Yet beyond the shared technical foundation of 'how' prints are made, this project also explores the fundamental question of 'what’ is made through the process of printing. This starting position respects traditions and conventions of artistic printmaking but then goes on to speculate about emergent meanings that arise when individual printmakers create work from identical source material.

In doing so the Collective project considers printmaking (and printmakers) in relation to a world where content-sharing and image reproduction have evolved significantly in recent years.

To be more specific, it was only 2009 when artist Hito Steyerl described the value and contemporary ‘reality’ of ‘the poor image’.[i] At the time Steyerl was observing a pervasive visual language of noticeable degradation—incurred when images were reproduced for sharing across digital devices and the internet. Today, sharing images is unlikely to result in aberration.

In the time since Steyerl's writing, light-speed reproduction of digitally liberated, high-resolution image information has become ubiquitous. Accompanying this, the technology of everyday display devices has improved to the point where the delivery of images, at typical viewing distances, no longer reveals the pixelated trace of reproductive processes. In contrast with Steyerl's visibly ‘poor image’, and as a result of intervening developments, it could be argued that the current 'reality' of image reproduction is now characteristically invisible.

This progression toward invisible process extends to print production—evident in how even domestic desktop-printers can now rival photographic seamlessness. However, unlike the mass online migration towards invisibility, the material processes of printmaking often remain necessarily visible and characteristic. For example, the mechanically required and visible dots of silkscreening invite noticeably different encounters compared to the barely perceptible dots of an inkjet. And the tangible surface of prints may also reveal an architecture of production—as is the case with intaglio prints which, in addition to delivering an image, are often impressed with a narrative of process.

Given this context, the initial project prompt (to create prints from a common source) invites deeper consideration. The Collective’s experimental approach to printmaking offers a chance to explore not only the resulting artwork, but also the functional transfer of contemporary images.

ARTWORKS:

enquire.

BLOCKPROJECTS 26/2/23 BLOCKPROJECTS 26/2/23

retrovision: jean-charles Blais - christian bonnefoi - maurice cockrill

In Collaboration with Annandale Galleries, Blockprojects is pleased to present Retrovision, an exhibition of exceptional paintings and works on paper by three iconic European artists: Jean-Charles Blais, Christian Bonnefoi and Maurice Cockrill.

28.02.2023 – 25.03.2023

Installation images, Retrovision: Jean-Charles Blais - Christian Bonnefoi & Maurice Cockrill . Blockprojects, 2023. Photography: Simon Strong

In Collaboration with Annandale Galleries, Blockprojects is pleased to present, Retrovision, an exhibition of exceptional paintings and works on paper by three iconic European artist of the 1980s and 1990s: Jean-Charles Blais, Christian Bonnefoi and Maurice Cockrill.

SELECTED ARTWORKS:

Tom Vincent 18/8/22 Tom Vincent 18/8/22

the colour & the shape

10.08.2022 – 03.09.2022

Installation images, The Colour & The Shape. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong

Blockprojects is please to present The Colour & The Shape, a group exhibition exploring the visual language between shape, form, colour and line in abstraction.

ARTISTS:

Steven Asquith, James Clayden, David Freney-Mills, Jason Haufe, Kyle Jenkins, Paul Newcombe, Tom Vincent, David Wallage.

SELECTED ARTWORKS:

Tom Vincent 11/4/22 Tom Vincent 11/4/22

now & then : 40 years of abstraction

08.04.2022 – 16.04.2022

Installation images, Now & Then : 40 Years of Abstraction . Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong

This group exhibition features a selection of abstract works from the last 40 years.

ARTISTS:

Steven Asquith, Neil Keith Baker, Stephen Bram, Merric Brettle, James Clayden, Dan Dan Dai, Robert Jacks
Dale Frank, Marc Freeman, Denise Green, Kyle Jenkin, Michael Staniak, John Nixon, Julia Powles, David Thomas, Vivian Cooper Smith, Tom Vincent, Peter Westwood, what.

SELECTED ARTWORKS:

Tom Vincent 23/4/21 Tom Vincent 23/4/21

THE DIRECTOR’S CHOICE 2021: important australian & international works of art.

17.04.2021 – 28.04.2021

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The Director's Choice | Installation 1.jpg

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The Director's Choice - Installation 10.jpg

Installation images, The Director’s Choice 2021: Important Australian and international Works of Art. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Angela McKinnon

This group exhibition features a selection of abstract and figurative paintings, works on paper and sculpture by important Australian and International artists.