Project 17: Radical Immanence

The annual APG Project Series, a keystone within the Melbourne arts program, provides a significant platform through which contemporary currents and key concerns can be interrogated and explored.

A curated group exhibition, Radical Immanence brings together the work of twelve Australian contemporary artists to explore concepts of sincerity and materiality as located within an expanded field of painterly practice.

Within the whorling maelstrom of contemporary culture, the exhibition invites sincere contemplation and engagement with materiality and form, an acute sensitivity to the vibrations which ‘underlie the solidity of things’. Within this context, the exhibition asks: what could it mean to engage with material in sincere terms? To what extent is this a radical, contemporary act?

Oscillating between highly gestural mark making, embodied practice, geometric investigations and colour theory, each artist is united by unique reverence and conviction in their explorations of material potentials, and individual concerns. Eschewing self-consciousness in favour of a sensitivity to material and form, this exhibition encourages a return to looking inward, to sensitivity, in order to better orient ourselves within uncertain and tumultuous times.

Although the exhibition looks toward the experimental potential of both representational and non-representational painterly practices, it also seeks to break down traditional material boundaries, emphasising possibilities as occurring within and outside the formal limitations of medium and concept.

Photography by Christo Crocker