Lazy Racer is an exhibition of highly individual images. Each painting is an unpredicted synthesis of ideas pulled from Hooper’s storehouse of painterly memory.

Hooper builds his images on chance-based drawing systems. A rigorous editing process of overpainting, erasure and addition, brings together various signs and configurations into precise visual relationships. Each painting is worked until it develops an internal logic and possesses its own formal complexity. The experience for the viewer is as uncharted as Hooper’s approach. We roam through his amalgam of sources and freely speculate. Suggestive transparencies, dark shadow and looping lines conjure ambiguous landscapes. There is a sense of the night-time carnival and the fun park in these works, and the experience of looking at them is akin to the colour and rush of the ride.

Hooper steers a course that passes close to contemporary abstraction, traditional painting territories, endgame whirlpools and personal recollection, to discover images that are new and surprising.

Born in Auckland in 1966, Julian Hooper has held over 20 solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and New York. His work is currently on display in Necessary Distraction, a survey of contemporary New Zealand painting at Auckland Art gallery Toi o Tamaki. Hooper is represented in the Queensland Art Gallery collection as well as major collections throughout New Zealand including the Chartwell and Wallace collections, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the University of Auckland collection.

Press release courtesy Gallery 9.