MARCH – WINSTON ROETH – SYDNEY

WINSTON ROETH

Winston Roeth is less a painter of colour as he is a painter of sensation. Not the Saatchi definition that confuses sensation with “shock” and “sensational” but rather the notion of sensation as a function of feeling and perception.

And yet colour remains the fundamental conduit to this awareness, albeit held within carefully defined compositions that concentrate his attention and ours. Roeth’s grids and borders serve as structural mechanisms that both slow and quicken vision, contain or release light – orient our sightlines to best experience the what Roeth himself described as the “drift”.

Roeth’s works are held in collections all over the world including MoMA, Albright Knox Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, Weisbaden Museum, Benesse House, Naoshima.  Alongside these collections there have been site-specific commissions and installations such as that in Sassuolo Italy where Roeth was commissioned by the Panza Collection to paint eleven permanent works for the Palazzo Ducale. These eleven paintings sit seamlessly in this Baroque palace despite the extravagant décor. Perhaps in a way Roeth’s apparently minimal paintings are in fact more maximal. Their presence, their luminosity, their character is such that they don’t retreat into the space, they are constantly reactive and immersive – dancing with the light. In this sense they are closer to Turrell than Jo Baer, more Matisse than Cezanne.

This is the eighth solo exhibition the gallery has made with Winston Roeth and his work has been included in more than ten curated projects over a 22-year period including Points of Orientation, Detox, Lux, RIM, Farben and The Architecture of Colour.