City Art is a conservation framing workshop and gallery offering a range of museum-standard picture framing and art care services to artists, art collectors, museums and galleries.

Peter Adsett

Over the past two decades Peter Adsett has built a considerable career as an accomplished and distinctive abstract artist. His large canvases challenge our preconceptions of art as illusionist storytelling in favour of an exploration of painting, process and the very physical architecture of paint on canvas. Adsett uses light and dark that are never completely light or completely dark. He uses forms that swing out or back in to the painting in subtle subversion of our expectations of order and well-behaved two-dimensionality. The sheer physicality of the paintings – Adsett builds his work with about 80 layers of paint – boycotts our expectations of narrative, of formal composition, even of verticality (Adsett works on the ground) as the standard dichotomy of light and dark, foreground and background, within the frame and outside the frame, is deliberately foiled. Even the orthodoxy of line is undermined as darkness leeches into light, borders snap half way down the edge, colour glows from under the painted surface. The resulting works are compelling, unsettling and strangely beautiful.

Born in Gisborne, now based in Melbourne, Peter Adsett has exhibited widely throughout Australia, Japan, the US and New Zealand. In his exploration of alternatives to Western traditions of painting he has worked closely with a number of indigenous artists including a landmark collaboration with Kimberley elder Rusty Peters.

Gallery:

Peter Adsett
Mark Braunias
Marcus Capes
Peter Carson
Stephen Clarke
Allen Cox
Michael Dell
Andrew Drummond
Guy Frederick
Michael Hamblett
Jeffrey Harris
Roger Hickin
Maree Horner
Kathryn Madill
Michael Reed
Zina Swanson
Philip Trusttum