Stephen Killick: Cartographies of the Absolute

20 Jan

Stephen Killick, Hope, acrylic on Fabriano paper, 150cm x 120cm.

Stephen Killick (b.1947) has been making art for fifty years. His latest exhibition, Cartographies of the Absolute, is a deep dive into the unknown, via technology and media. Killick presents vignettes of worldly disarray, then withdraws into beauty – shapes floating on colour, optical puzzles that never quite resolve, assays about nature and the sublime.

Killick’s work is characterised by these ‘travels, quite rhythmic, from positive to negative’ … with the resting point of the sublime.

The constant touchstones of Killick’s art remain vested in the elements that shape our world: climate and environmental change, the apocalypse of many and constant international wars, humans at odds with each other, in harmony with nature, dressed for battle, and the spectre of AI.

Killick’s practice, writes Louise Martin-Chew, is a self and existential exploration, with lyricism, bewilderment and joy his accompanists.

“In Killick’s hands we share a journey that touches and echoes our own, as humans trying to make sense of a world that is at once tangible and removed; the push pull of modernity that may provide physical comfort but induce existential terror.

“The many facets of what we are and know are assembled in this pithy and electric exploration by one of Australia’s most significant artistic talents. Killick’s commitment is absolute.”