In this latest group of paintings, Stuart Watters invents a new cast of forms that drift across the canvas like the debris from a vast cataclysm. Architectural structures highlighted with incendiary flashes of red and yellow hover over smoky grey grounds. Dark lines travel across the surfaces of the works like radar tracks, breaking off into biomorphic shapes and strange glyphs. These linear projections create a foreground tension against the agitated underpainting, holding the pictorial drama together. Slyly referencing contemporary warfare, environmental vandalism and the cultural ‘flattening’ wrought by globalisation, Flatland is an imaginative response to the complex and fractured state of the world as Watters sees it. This is his second solo exhibition with Gallery 9.
Stuart Watters holds a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW and currently lectures in painting and drawing at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney. Since the 1980s he has held solo shows with well known Sydney Galleries including Hogarth, Crawford, Kaliman and Boutwell Draper and has been a finalist in major prizes including the Redlands Westpac Contemporary Art Prize, The Fishers’ Ghost, The Salon des Refusés and Dobell Prize. His work is included in the collections of Artbank, the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation and the UNSW Art Collection as well as corporate and private collections overseas.
Press release courtesy Gallery 9.
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