Elsewhere

Andrew Frost

Lucinda Chambers has forged an idiosyncratic path through painting since her early exhibitions in the late 1990s.  Chamber’s interest in painting, from figurative work to abstraction, has evidenced a curious imagination at work, at once enthralled by the possibility of what different genres of painting can achieve, but at the same time drawn to subtly confusing and mixing genres. Her latest show at Charles Hewitt, appropriately entitled Elsewhere, is another prime example of the artist’s eccentricity.

On first look this show appears to be a series of large still life paintings of plants and flowers. Although the scale is unusual – the largest work measuring in at 167 by 152 centimetres – what’s hidden within the pictures is decidedly odd. The painting Shivery is a vertical format picture of slender plant and down at the bottom of the plant, among the roots, is a man in a bowler hat standing next to a small campfire. And so, across the suite of paintings, similar scene are discovered amongst the foliage – a pair of women wandering across a leaf, some sight seers gathering at the edge of a leaf, figures at play on another. Not all the pictures have figures within, but in Chamber’s imagination the plants are transformed from one genre into another where still life becomes landscape becomes a whole universe of action and mystery.

Until January 18

Charles Hewitt Gallery, Marrickville