2007 SYDNEY BALL STRUCTURES 2: ABSTRACT ARCHITECTURE

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Sydney Ball was born in Adelaide in 1933. He studied at the South Australian School of Art and later at the Art Students League of New York. In New York Ball had his first solo exhibition of colour abstraction paintings at the uptown Westerly Gallery as well as being included in several group exhibitions.

In an introduction to the exhibition of Canto paintings by Sydney Ball at the Museum of Modern Art and Design in Melbourne in 1965, artist and teacher Theodore Stamos wrote: ‘Sydney Ball is concerned with colour; he has looked toward those who base their canvases on it – Matisse, Albers, Rothko and Newman. In this he is related to, but is more concerned with pictorial architecture than are Louis, Noland and Kelly….. Colour and line react aggressively against each other, the directness and pictorial economy at first stuns the viewer, however the paintings enforce a contemplation more exacting than the simplicity of the forms seem to require...’ Theodore Stamos, New York 1965.

Now in 2007 Ball has again looked to Pictorial Architecture to make Architectonic forms that are direct in their economy and beautiful in their simplicity. His love of Modernist Architecture has lead him to explore the work of Mies Van Der Rohe and Zaha Hadid and their vision of form and structure emanating in Abstract Architecture.

These explicatory contemporary minimal works in Structures 2, deal with Abstract entities that refine form through their colour simplicity. Ball again shows that he is creating a fresh personal statement that places him well within the main tradition of 21st century painting. www.sydneyballart.com.au