Emma Beer

A solo show at Drill Hall Gallery for an artist with a long relationship to the institution, Emma Beer's "Zooper Dooper" opens expansive fields of feeling and perception – whether you're examining the paintings or the history which informs them.

There it is, striated beneath the blocks of pink – irregular, in a way which feels permissive –  a few glimpses of green ground. This ground, swung behind the pink, is elsewhere left visible: drawn across the canvas of laboured learning, 2021, as a thin veil which does more revealing than hiding, shifting with the fibrousness of its base. At times, a translucent blue counteracts this sweep, tracing upwards – though never in too insistently straight a line. At others, the green ground is closed off entirely by an opaque black, though there is still a pervasive sense of this ground’s being there, nevertheless. 

In a catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition Zooper Dooper at ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery, Anja Loughead contends that Beer’s paintings “explore what, or how little, can constitute a painting. Devoid of symbols or signifiers,” Loughead writes, “the artist creates space for all-allusive feelings.” If much of the interest of seeing Beer’s paintings is in the expansive effects of  interactions – often, intimacies – between colours, textures, and levels of transparency or opacity, then there is also in Loughead’s analysis another set of structuring relationships. These are between forms, on the one hand, and on the other, the embodied experiences we have with and in front of the work.

In a conversation also published alongside the exhibition, Dionisia Salas observes of Beer’s paintings that, formally, “it’s the seams that make everything quiver.” Encountering these paintings in the gallery space, we might ask in this same spirit: Where is the seam between my feeling body and the painting’s – and, moreover, the room’s? To my view, these works feel like invitations to consider these haptic questions, even more than they feel like invitations to consider the history of abstraction within which we might place them: Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, even Mondrian, in a more highly-strung way.

The works exhibited here respond to the particularities of Drill Hall’s gallery space, keeping in mind the subtle motion of light as it changes through the day. Beer, the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition in the gallery’s history, would know these motions well, as an alumnus of the ANU School of Art & Design, and its current Senior Technical Officer. Which is to say, perhaps don’t take my word for it – go and stand in the exhibition, in front of a painting, and create a seam along which to quiver. 

EXHIBITION
Zooper Dooper
10 February – 10 April 2022
Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra