Darryn Ansted’s Collecting shadows project is a response to the Dahlem Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, taking two encased artefacts (from the Museum’s collection of over half a million ethnographic objects from around the world) as the subject for a series of experimental paintings. While ostensibly still life in genre – the depiction of an African carving and a Thai statue of the Buddha – Ansted’s paintings depict their subjects by using only their shadows, representing them through an artistic strategy of partial erasure. The result is an empty but richly moody evocation of space.
Melody Smith Gallery
August 18 to September 9, 2012
Perth
Shadow Painting 7, 2012, oil on board, 120 x 120cm
Courtesy the artist and Melody Smith Gallery, Perth
