3rd Dec 2021 – 6th Feb 2022
Bennett Gallery
Form & The Universe of Colour is an exhibition that brings together a collection of recent works by Nick Selenitsch and an ambitious new project specifically developed for Benalla Art Gallery. Thematically, the exhibition focuses on the most basic of artistic characteristics: Form and Colour. Works from recent solo exhibitions & (2020) and The Nature of Things (2016) will be presented alongside a site-specific chalk drawing, Ο.
Ο will consist of several large single-colour circles executed by the artist and members of the community. Visitors to the exhibition will be asked to participate in the making of the work. It is essentially a large-scale colouring-in project. Combined with two sets of artworks that investigate our relationship with other rudimental structures – Transmission towers (The Nature of Things); and, the ampersand (&) – the large Οs will act as a means to reflect upon our relationship to the simplest of design forms. Their design also responds directly to the architecture of Benalla Art Gallery, itself a significant example of elemental construction.
French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne once said at the turn of the 20th Century “Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet”. What he was trying to say is that despite all our human-made and technological complexity, it is through the most simple and direct sensory experiences that we connect with the actual ‘stuff-of-matter’ around us. By experiencing colour – or at times, simple forms – we merge with our environment in a direct bodily way, a way that is outside of any means of expression. In other words: We don’t see colour and form; we do colour and form.
