DIANA ELLINGER

1 - 10 July 2022 @ CCAS MANUKA

Diana Ellinger is a contemporary artist based in Canberra whose painting practice builds upon established notions of abstraction. Using modernist ideas as springboards, Ellinger’s work is a persistent experiment that examines gestural painting in a contemporary light. In the spirit of Action Painting, a movement particular to post-war New York, Ellinger sees the canvas as ‘an arena in which to act’ (Rosenberg 1952). She seeks to occupy her work so that the process of its making is foregrounded.

Applying paint broadly in lines, Ellinger works with momentum across a series of paintings at a time. With a complex palette and an intimate presentation of paint as a material, focus is paid to minute details – minor gradations in colour, the effect of marks made from a height, subtleties in surface, or the hum of two equivalent hues co-existing. These quiet moments are pitched against bigger territories of conflict and movement, so that the picture plane is invaded by a diversity of marks. The canvases acquire a worked-over appearance, which is at times interrupted or blocked by screens of paint dragged across their surfaces, or by mini dams of poured paint left to dry in a mould. These blocking devices serve to obscure layers beneath, which in turn play with depth, compressing or altering the sense of space in the painting.

Image: Diana Ellinger, Garden Variety, 2020, acrylic on 300gsm Archers Paper, 76 x 57cm. Photo by Nikole Ramsay.