yonder
Solo Exhibition
04.06 - 26.06 2016
With a lush tactility and heady mystique, the painted worlds of Alexia Vogel translate the amoebic, sublime nature of nostalgia, fantasy and yearning into vast, immersive canvases and vivid works on paper. Her imagined paradises disavow the logic of time in order to reach a space and state more felt than perceived, creating spaces of sustained reverie and suspended sensation. With her mark making directed by instinct and spontaneity, Vogel allows the tactility of the paint and its autonomous movement across the surface of canvas to direct her process. Moments of lucidity dissolve into states of dreamy meditation as the artist intuitively shifts between abstraction and figuration, resulting in images that are experiences in themselves, utterly absorbing and affecting.
In Yonder Vogel extends her inquiry into the notion of distance, travel and geography and engages again with the tension between real and imagined locales. Meandering rivers beckon us to an undetermined or unattainable destination, while overgrown foliage alludes to a vast and unknown wilderness which we somehow find ourselves in the center of, unsure of our next step, of the way back, out or through. Traces of imagined journeys, these works will also undertake a literal voyage to a place unfamiliar to Vogel, Yonder being her first solo show in Australia. The ideas of distance, space and geography are thus both conceptually implied and literally inscribed within the body of work. Vogel’s own sense of “yonder” as her work travels to a foreign land parallels the mode of daydream and fantasy in which her paintings take shape.
Text by Charis de Kock
