Chris Dewar ‘Moon Raft’

CHRIS DEWAR’s work is about the interplay of colour and shape, and the object-making of painting. Exploring scenes from the day-to-day environment, the forms are a play between abstraction and figuration. From his studio on the NSW Central Coast Chris Dewar’s practice includes painting, printmaking, and drawing. With these processes he builds dream-like compositions that hint at story and meaning but hide themselves from conclusions. There is a gentle humour and restfulness in his work, though the shapes and colours consort in ambiguity. “It’s this ambiguity that I keep returning to, continuing to clarify and distil the palette and compositions of my work.” Chris received his BFA (Painting) from The National Art School in 2012, also receiving the Indigenous Art Centre Internship Award in the same year. Chris received the Gosford Art Prize 2D Award in 2014 and the Defiance Award and Nock Foundation Award in the 2020 Paddington Art Prize.

“I work with painting and screen-printing using acrylic and oil paint on aluminium, timber and paper. The works are stacked shapes and colours, intuitively placed forms resting in a floating disorientation. The process is a life-cycle: laying down colours, sanding or ghosting them, and re-establishing them in ways which are similar but not the same. The repeated process eventually ends up as an object that includes both a history of the original source and decisions towards the new. The compositions never fully enter a new state, but rather veer back into transition.”