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Michael Adamson, Dougal Graham & Sawan YawnghweAugust 1998 |
 Michael Adamson installation |
 Dougal Graham, Sawan Yawnghwe Hot Dog Dance oil on canvas 1998 |
 Dougal Graham, Sawan Yawnghwe Italian Motorsports oil on canvas 1998 |
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Young painters launching their careers, Michael Adamson, Dougal Graham and Sawan Yawnghwe produce works that are beautiful, carefully considered and remarkably self-conscious. In choosing how and where to make their marks they appraise both the historical and social implications of painting itself and also of their chosen subject matter. Their works emerge from a conceptual approach to artmaking as well as the New Image Painting of the 1980s in which such American artists as Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Jean-Michael Basquiat reintroduced the figure to painting along with a new, raw way of perceiving the form and incorporating into the pictures images from contemporary life. Michael Adamson's paintings are pared down line images depicting girls' faces on surfaces where layers of colour have been built up and then scraped away to reveal strata of pigment. Taking his images from found photographs, the girls' faces are repeated and become familiar to the viewer through exposure, but are not representations of a particular person nor do they convey any sense of personality. They are, rather, exercises in objectivity that also become objects of, and about beauty. Sawan Yawnghwe and Dougal Graham work collaboratively to create paintings that are simultaneously knowing and naive. Working on large-scale canvases, they paint images of women taken from fashion magazines surrounded by representations of urban detritus - signs, cars, bottles, words, graffiti scribbles and childlike renderings. Using this stream-of-consciousness flow of imagery, Yawnghwe and Graham exploit both the hilarity and the deadly seriousness of the contemporary proliferation of images with which we are helplessly surrounded. Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 - 5:00 For information, telephone (416) 920 3820 |