Five Walls
MINIMAL \ REDUCTIVE
Curated by Aaron Martin
February 7th - March 1st, 2025
Minimal \ Reductive is part of a larger series of Minimal exhibitions initiated by Art Collector and JAHM Director Charles Justin, planned for 2025, including exhibitions at the Justin Art House Museum and Charles Nodrum Gallery. This series emphasises the multifaceted interpretations of minimalism across different contexts.
At Five Walls Gallery, Minimal \ Reductive investigates the enduring legacy of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism in painting, photography, and sculpture. Bringing together twelve contemporary artists from Australia, China, Germany, and Japan, the exhibition explores reductive art through diverse material and conceptual approaches. The participating artists transcend reductivism as a purely formal approach, embracing it as a fluid, dynamic process that intertwines restraint with experimentation. Their works open pathways for dialogue, examining reduction not as an endpoint but as a means of exploring perception, color, form, space, and time. Through this process, the exhibition expands the discourse around minimalism and reductivism, reaffirming their relevance and adaptability in contemporary art.
Five Walls Projects
Susan Andrews
Three, nine, twelve
September 19th – October 18th, 2025
These object-based paintings question traditional pictorial conventions by treating the surface and its support structure as integral components in the development of the work. Three, nine, twelve celebrates the physical reality of painting as constructed object, where painted edges, gaps, and support systems become active participants in the visual dialogue, interacting with the viewer and architectural space of the gallery.
I’ve been questioning the rationale of conventional painting: not painting the edge or sides of the painting defines the parameters of pictorial space, confining the viewer to look at the work from a single viewpoint. The title of this exhibition reflects the measured spaces/gaps in both the top, bottom and sides of each painting.
Two twentieth-century post-WW2 artists, Lucio Fontana and Imi Knoebel, remain influential in the development of my work. The Argentinian/Italian painter Lucio Fontana created flat monochromatic colour painting, then slashed and perforated the surface of his canvas to reveal the limit and limitlessness of space. While Imi Knoebel’s paired down formal vocabulary of painted plywood, aluminium and paper constructions creates deceptive spatiality through his haptic use of colour. My work pays homage to both artists’ works while extending upon their knowledge of abstraction as an enquiry-based practice. The evolving language of abstraction continues to encourage considered observation, reflection, memory, colour and spatial investigation, while not forgoing the complexities of one’s lived experiences.
Colour is elastic and remains an important element in the work. I explore colour to reverse perceptions of proximity and distance, weight and lightness. The language of colour can also be emotive, and often shaped by our cultural and social lived experience, memory and perception. The works in Three, nine, twelve invite the viewer to contemplate, interpret their imaginative response and meaning to the work. The exploration of colour within this framework takes on heightened significance; it doesn't merely sit on the surface but interacts with both the viewer and the architectural elements. Painted edges and gaps create spatial shifts with each viewing angle. Structural necessity becomes aesthetic opportunity, space becomes multidimensional.