Sarah Bentley Curates Trans-Tasman Dialogue

Curator and art writer New Zealander Serena Bentley creates a dialogue between two Melbourne painters – Kate Smith and Meagan Wyke – and three Aucklanders – Schaeffer Lemalu, Patrick Lundberg, Campbell Patterson – in an exhibition which has opened at Melbourne’s West Space and runs until 16 April.

Called Economy, the show finds “a kinship” between the artists based on a shared economy of means, smallness of scale and – in some of the works – an interest in working with the existing paint surfaces of found materials.

Bentley describes the artists’ shared focus as an interest in “minimal, abstract and semi-suburban painting” that also has a wry sense of humour.

Lemalu, for example, is represented by a fragile body of work made using ink pigment on tissue paper.

“They eventually got so minimal that there would literally be little dots on the tissue and that would be it,” Bentley says.

Bentley was the 2014 recipient of an Ian Potter Foundation travel grant to research contemporary visual arts practice in Taipei and Manila. She holds a Master of Arts in art history from the University of Auckland.

Original article by Dylan Rainforth, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 15, 2016.