GENE A'HERN

Gene A’Hern’s practice is meditative. The artist’s compositions cull from the depths of his subconscious; emotions spill out, revealing themselves to him just as they do to the viewer.

And through colour, A’Hern gives weight to his work. Oil, acrylic, spray paint, and pastel trace the automatic movements of his hands in the studio, a site of creation, meditation, and growth for the artist. Threads and textiles are embedded in the surfaces, creating radical geometries on their mottled faces—for A’Hern, art-making takes place at the moment of creation. ‘It’s always about clarity,’ the artist explains.

‘The clarity of emotion and the clarity of movement. It has to be consistent.’

A’Hern lives in Katoomba, Australia, just to the west of Sydney, nestled in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Recognisable figures from this dynamic landscape break through in the artist’s abstraction, whether in the primordial drama of his Sky Paintings or in the friends and family that call this community home.

Many of the pieces in Day Pours Speech, Night Reveals Knowledge have a basis in figuration: portraits, landscapes, still lifes; yet his practice so crucially engages the discourses of abstraction. For A’Hern, abstraction and figuration are in constant conversation in with each other when art-making. The artist cites Richard Diebenkorn and Per Kirkeby as painters whose works travel along this line, their factures inexorably theirs, even as their tendencies, both literal and impressionistic, negotiate meaning from piece to piece, decade to decade.

This is Gene A’Hern’s first solo show in the United States and his first at Simchowitz. He is a graduate of the National Arts School in Sydney.

Day Pours Speech, Night Reveals Knowledge will be on view from May 7 to May 28.