Gallery 9 is delighted to present works by Mark Rodda in his solo exhibition More Nebula Paintings. We welcome you to join us in celebrating the opening of this exhibition and meet the artist at Gallery 9 on Wednesday 8 May from 6-8pm.

In 2016, after an abstraction hiatus, Mark Rodda returned to this form of painting with a group of works which all included the word Nebula as part of their title. The Nebula subject referred to galactic and/or quantum mysteries and how painting can act as a simulacrum to mimic these entities. These ideas dwell on the rhymes and similarities between the cosmic and the atomic, the macro a the micro, the basic idea that an atom looks strangely like a solar system, and how those clues could feed into speculation about the unknown.

In 2024 Mark Rodda returned to this theme within this new show at Gallery 9, More Nebula Paintings. The construction of these images has relied heavily on the manipulation and juxtaposition of different states of viscosity within paint and the painting medium. Mark Rodda is interested in the many unknowns and chaotic results involved in these interactions, to him they offer nutritious fodder for existential meditation. Furthermore, on another level, this process seems to create representations that you could actually think exist in the cosmos. So much so that, in a way, they can be viewed as not abstraction at all, but figurative flights of fancy, drawn from the themes mentioned above.

As usual with Mark Rodda exhibitions there are outlier works that slightly veer from the theme, within this show these come in the form of two figurative paintings on canvas. These works follow the romantic landscape themes that have been the bedrock of Mark Rodda's oeuvre over the last few decades. The feel of these figurative images seem to share a visual bond with the artist's new Nebula paintings, even if their aims and intentions steer in a different direction.

The abstract pieces were all created using a unique technique that has been slowly developed by the artist over the last half decade. This is a process of painting an image in reverse (on glass or a solid surface), peeling the finished work off that surface, flipping it, and attaching it to a wood panel. This gives the work an unusual, almost printed surface feel which highlights details that normal painting techniques often hide, similar to painting on glass (but without the glass as a final support). This technique also creates the illusion that the image could be some sort of exotic stone or marble which has been highly polished.

Born 1973 in Tasmania, Rodda has held over 17 solo exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand and has shown in group exhibitions and festivals internationally and around the country. In 2013 he was a finalist in the Wynne Prize for landscape at the Art Gallery of NSW and in 2014 won the Glover Prize, Australia's richest prize for landscape painting. Rodda is represented in private and public collections including Artbank, the Glover Prize Collection, the Trust Bank Collection, Australian Catholic University, and MONA.

Press release courtesy Gallery 9.