New Works 2023 presents a combination of practice by Joseph Daws, with a debut into sculptural pieces. The exhibition includes new paintings that continue Daws’ interest in landscape and still-life, presented alongside an abstract body of work which examines pixelated imagery and digital processes. The new sculptures are an extension of Daws recent Resolution paintings, where the artist sampled pixels from digital images of his work, enlarged the grid, and recreated the correlating hues in oil paint. Of this process, Daws states:
“I was interested in how the pixels operate as a pictorial space on this scale, and how the viewer reads this space. There is a minimalist, optical quality to them at times, and they sometimes read more or less so abstracted from actual associations with the real world.”
Daws’ plywood sculptures leave the nature of the substrate unhidden, highlighting a tensity within their materiality:
“It creates a tension between the ‘boxiness’ of the work and any illusional/pictorial space it presents—akin to the white primer of an unfinished painting disrupting the pictorial plane.”
Together, this new body of work integrates a continuous thread of practice and shares insight into the artist’s iterative processes, combining a physical and digital studio. The diversity in styles throughout this exhibition highlight a multitude of compositional play and a conversation between two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives.
Image: Coonowirn I, 2023, oil on canvas, 76 x 91 cm with Block 3, 5, 4, 1 and 6. Image credit: Carl Warner
