There is a kind of brilliance going on at Sullivan+Strumpf that pairs these icons of colour and form so effortlessly. One a major Australian painter, the other a major Australian designer. But there is something more than calibre at play in this joining of forces.
By way of a catch up, Sydney Ball, always known as Syd, is one of the masters of Australian painting. Starting out to be an architect, and in fact spending much of his later life in the Ball-Eastaway House designed by Glenn Murcutt, which he and the artist Lynne Eastaway commissioned (Glenorie, outside Sydney), he switched to art in the fifties. By the early sixties he knew it was his thing and moved to New York to study under Theodore Stamos at the Art Students League.
New York in the fifties was everything the young artist dreamed of and his mind was blown by the abstract expressionists, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko, whose studios he was able to visit as a student. Ellsworth Kelly was also active and New York-based at the time, and his interest in shape and form shares a commonality with Syd’s direct use of colour on geometric shaped canvases. Syd’s work in this space is luminous and intimate, arranged and without subject other than the art object itself. Meanwhile, Kelly’s is monumental and subject-derived, yet each work exists within their own signature style.
Flack, who first encountered Syd’s work through school, was swept away with the reality of the work exhibited the National Gallery of Victoria’s major exhibition The Field: Revisited in 2018. Since then he has collected Syd’s work personally, into the Flack Studio collection, and curated it into his client’s collections.
“Sydney Ball’s largescale works appear as an interior or landscape in their own right, with their dynamic use of colour, play of shape, form and depth. I have long admired him as Australia’s greatest abstract artist, and continue to be incredibly drawn to his drawings, paintings and sculptures, both for my own personal art collection and in my work,” says Flack.
What makes the pairing of Flack and Syd so interesting is the way each uses colour. There is the thrilling insouciance of the initial impact with both, then comes the rigour and weight that stands the test of time and mellows to the composition of the whole. Syd’s large arranged pieces in the series Infinex, for example, are compositionally balanced with loud and muted colours delivering a comprehensive piece that is in itself neither loud nor muted. It is an interesting challenge and one we see Flack approach in his interiors, which sing with chromatically brilliant colours, but are contained by large expanses of timber, stone and muted elements so that nothing is out of place.
Compositionally, within a Flack interior, this is carried through to scale with large volumes of colour or form being balanced with finer detailing or a sharp shift in materiality. Interestingly, it may even be the placement of a Syd Ball artwork that creates the compositional balance or chromatic dynamism. For both artist and designer, the elements of an artwork or interior are alive to possibility, with each introduced or removed element going towards the final outcome.
Syd’s Oceania, 1978, for example, from the Stain series is an explosion of orange and blue, yet, while the primary colous are complimentary, there are so many more, and the dark balances the light, the sparse balances the solid and the large is balanced by the small. In the same line, Flack’s Terrace House, 2024, uses complimentary red and green as the foundational colours, but overriding this an abundance of other colours, form and scale, light and dark, bold and nuance.
There is also something of the sculptural eye alive in Flack’s interiors that links to Syd’s work. Forgoing convention, each moulds the world to their own unique perspective. For Syd it is the shaped canvases that are sculptural forms in their own right. For Flack it is the interior as a three-dimensional space where objects are placed with the same mindfulness of spatial resonance as a sculpture etches in space. Effectively, both are as interested in the shape around the object as the object perse, and how the object affects the rest of the room, how it catches the eye, truncates or accelerates flow.
The exhibition itself is a curation of works that, rather than exemplify Syd’s career, highlights the connectivity of ides running through his oeuvre. “A curiosity of scale and shape, and an interest in seeing Ball’s works from across the years and across his various distinct series in concert with one another,” concludes Flack.
It is in fact a very fine exhibition.
The Weight of Colour runs at Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne gallery from 29th August to 5th October, 2024.
Read about the 2024 Winnings x Habitus House of the Year jury here