David Serisier – Colour Real and Imagined

Image: untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting

 

Of all Australian painters of his generation, David Serisier is perhaps the most closely identified with American abstraction.

Unapologetically beautiful, rigorous in the application of scale, with an ability to adapt to a given architecture, Serisier’s paintings make few concessions to the reigning ideologies of Australian art.

He was a resident in New York during the late 1980s-early 1990s, when his study of late-modernist American art from Rothko and Newman to Marden and Flavin inspired the spirit of confidence, clarity and grandeur which became typical of his paintings.

For this exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery, Serisier has conceived an installation for the central space. It is composed of customized, multi-panelled paintings. These make a feature of what he calls ‘digital colour.’ He derives his high-keyed, incandescent chroma from pre-existing cinema images, digitally sampled.

The side galleries give a historical background to the installation, showing a selection of Serisier’s works from the past two decades.

David Serisier, untitled yellow and blue fluorescent light painting 2012, oil and wax on linen, 214 x 214 cm. Courtesy the artist and Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney