Exhibited throughout our Sydney gallery, a significant recent body of paintings by Ledgerwood are presented with four paintings by Gabori from 2009. Contrasting and complementary, here two bodies of work housed within the label of abstraction emerge with a formal similarity, yet coming from radically different cultural systems, revealing how inadequate that category can be. Seen together, they invite comparison, but also resist it. What appears familiar in one context carries a different meaning in another.

Gabori’s paintings destabilise the assumption of abstraction’s attachment to the lineage of Western modernism, significantly expanding the landscape genre, treating place expressionistically with the tools of abstraction as a communicative form. While Ledgerwood’s work critiques and expands that lineage from within. Her paintings question the values embedded in that tradition, particularly its claims to universality and its association with masculine authority. Through colour, pattern and scale, she transforms its terms, making space for ornament, pleasure and sensuality as serious forms of inquiry.

Across both practices, expansive compositional structures immerse the viewer in fields of colour and form. Looking becomes an active process of negotiation, questioning how meaning is made, how histories are inherited, and how different ways of knowing can coexist within the same space.