Stuart Watters | Flatland
Delve into the world of Stuart Watters as he cuts and thwarts the picture plane.
His latest exhibition Flatland, opens Monday 4 May in a myriad of painterly forms and linear projections.
Only his second solo show at Gallery 9, the artist is definitely making his mark. In this latest series of works, Watters’ brushstrokes strike across the canvas with a bounding energy that borders on limitless chaos. It is hard not to get drawn up into the artist’s evidently passionate foray to explore the potential of surface and composition.
Geometric shapes layer across and between the foreground and background, building a tension between the two, and evoking a pictorial drama. From first glance it is hard not to balk at the disorderly works, yet it is this energy that draws the eye into to contemplate Watters’ abstract depictions of the complex nature of the world.
Whilst each work holds its own, together Flatland weaves a narrative of Watters’ dystopian vision. As the artist notes “The title FLATLAND is a sly reference to the consequences of environmental vandalism and the destruction to civilisation caused by merciless warfare. The unfolding pictorial drama is also an ironical nod to flatness as the endgame of high modernism.”
With Stuart Watters new forms appear within an old format of painting, whatever your take, there is a magnetism in the artist’s gesture that speaks to the eye.
EXHIBITION
Stuart Watters: Flatland
4 – 28 May
Gallery 9
Courtesy the artist and Gallery 9
The first work you encounter in Edge City is a gate, Settlement #8, 2025. Not one to pass through (not anymore), but a threshold nonetheless....
Designed to impress, the number and size of paintings—twenty-nine at nine square metres each and one even bigger—are a spectacle, lifting the exhibition from an...
Skilfully assimilating secondary sources throughout Paris in Ruins, Smee at the conclusion of Part One, “Salon of 1869,” writes that Auguste Renoir’s and Claude Monet’s...
Multidisciplinary artist Shireen Taweel looks skyward, into the night and beyond, with her exhibition the trig point. Drawing on fieldwork in 2025 at the Siding...
It was back in 2011 that Pip Wallis, senior curator at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), remembers first seeing the work of Balinese...
Senior Pitjantjatjara artist, Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin, was born in 1952 near Bumbali Creek in the Northern Territory, close to the border with South Australia; daughter...
For those of us who seek out unfamiliar voices and see the potential for diverse cultures to create new meanings and memories in a postcolonial...
Show me the beauty of a body contorted by thrall. Then, show me the thrall. Shame is a vast word....
Kon Gouriotis: How did you come to be working with the Yinhawangka community? Pedram Khosronejad: My journey to working with the Yinhawangka community has...