GALLERY SALLY DAN-CUTHBERT
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • ABOUT
  • Artists and Designers
  • Exhibitions
  • Viewing Room
  • Art Fairs
  • STOCKROOM
  • News
  • Press
  • Contact
  • Iordanes Spyridon Gogos Exclusives
Menu
Heidi Melamed
Remnants, 14 April - 15 May 2022

Heidi Melamed: Remnants

Past exhibition
  • Overview
  • Works
  • Installation Views
Heidi Melamed, Remnants
View works

Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert is please to announce Heidi Melamed’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, REMNANTS. 

 

Encompassing painting and sculpture, Heidi Melamed’s practice reveals a fascination with form, especially colour, and the optical properties of light. 

 

Ever alert to new materials and methods with which to explore the affective potential of her formalist approach, the Sydney-based artist tempers her experimental flair with a perfectionist’s attention to detail and a highly resolved aesthetic grounded in geometric abstraction. 

 

For this exhibition Melamed has transformed industrial offcuts into sleek sculptural structures, used pencil shavings to create fields of colour that straddle painting and collage, and constructed tonal relief panels that exploit the reflective qualities of glitter and interference paint to meditative effect. 

 

Each of Melamed’s wall-based MOnuMENT structures comprises four tracery-board offcuts sourced from a perspex fabrication factory and assembled so as to delineate a rectangular portal of negative space at the centre. 

 

Edged in rose-gold mirrored glass, MOnuMENT White/Copper is painted white, silver, copper and brown, with an illusionistic ellipse of light framing the ‘doorway’. MOnuMENT Silver/Black is mostly that, with the addition of brown and a slanting ellipse in silver. The structure is edged in smoky-black mirrored glass. 

 

Carefully selecting the ‘found’ tracery patterns, Melamed unifies the disparate surfaces through spatial arrangement and the application of paint – in particular, by employing a spotlight effect that appears to bathe each object in focused illumination. 

 

In the Vertex series, the artist literally deconstructs a rainbow of pencils to make paintings, using both the colour-edged wooden shavings and the granular sharpenings of pencil pigment. While painstaking, this innovative, process-based approach produces visually spectacular results. The six works in this series are on circular, elliptical and pointed-elliptical supports. 

Each shaving has been meticulously affixed to the support to build up patterns that recall bird plumage. The sharpenings have been applied in a freer but no less time-consuming manner to create lyrically abstract ‘colour maps’ of pure and blended pigments, reminiscent in parts of hundreds-and-thousands. 

 

The delicate shavings of wood add their own champagne-coloured tints to the visual mix, while the tiny bands of colour around each (taken from the identifying colour on the outside of each pencil) are variously shaped like fans, squiggles and zigzags. As with MOnuMents, Vertex sees Melamed breathe new life into waste material. 

 

Completing the exhibition is Congruent GRID, a suite of eight paintings on board in a formation of two rows of four. The suite features a repeating pattern formed by intersecting parabolic curves, and the pointed ellipse in the middle of each painting echoes the contours of several Vertex works.

 

Austere and meditative, Congruent GRID is a subtle elaboration of mineral tones – cream, beige, salt-pink, copper – set against darker shades of steel-blue, grey and black. Several of the paintings are enlivened by sections in relief, which interrupt the picture plane, turning the image into an object. Employed sparingly, glitter and interference paint serve to reflect and transmit the play of light across the lustrous surfaces. 

 

Investigating the aesthetic potential of discarded or otherwise overlooked materials, REMNANTS achieves a kind of artistic alchemy. Focusing on colour and light, Heidi Melamed invites us to consider the concept of everyday transfiguration – those unbidden moments when we apprehend beauty hiding in plain sight. In so doing, she fine-tunes our capacity to transcend the apparent and glimpse the ideal. 

 

Tony Magnusson 

April 2022 

  • For Further Reading Please See The Viewing Room

Related artist

  • Heidi Melamed

    Heidi Melamed

Share
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Back to exhibitions

+612 9357 6606

20 McLachlan Avenue, Rushcutters Bay NSW 2011

gallery@sallydancuthbert.com

                                                      

                                                      

Send an email
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
View on Google Maps
Join the mailing list
Vimeo, opens in a new tab.
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2023 GALLERY SALLY DAN-CUTHBERT
Site by Artlogic

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences
Close

Join our mailing list

Interests *

Signup

* denotes required fields

We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy (available on request). You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.