Ways of Being| Natalie Lavelle

9 - 27 March, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to show Natalie Lavelle in her latest solo exhibition Ways of Being on display from 9 - 27 March, 2022. Lavelle's recent work shifts its gaze to the natural world by evoking both curiosity and nostalgia in layers, bleeds and sweeps of white, brown and blue. Each work expands beyond the canvas to suggest a vista of colour, light and material — seemingly both contained and spacious.

Exhibition essay writer Louise Mayhew states, “Thinking of these paintings as transformations of nature operates in two spatial directions: as an endless spilling out and an almighty gathering in. If you stand close to Lavelle’s larger canvases, so they fill your field of vision, you might imagine their washes of colour stretching forever, echoing the vastness as the Earth.”

Natalie Lavelle is an artist whose practice wavers between human and material concerns where abstraction and monochrome paintings have become the foundation of a personal pursuit to re-blur the limitations and boundaries of the traditional easel painting. Natalie has completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours Class I) from the Queensland College of Art (QCA) in 2020, and a Diploma of Visual Art from Southbank Institute of Technology (SBIT) in 2016.

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Rekindle | Natalie Lavelle

21 April - 9 May 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Natalie Lavelle in her latest exhibition Rekindle, on show from 21 April – 9 May 2021. This exhibition explores the luminosity and weight of colour in a ‘rekindling’ of the mid-century art movements of colour field abstraction and minimalism.

Rekindle demonstrates Lavelle’s playful edge as an artist through her minimalist aesthetic, attention to detail, and love for colour, which she washes over or stains onto the canvas in thin, successive layers. Her washes create bleeds which, against the overtly rectangular compositions of her works, revel in the uninformed movement of colour.

“At the centre of Lavelle’s work lies a simple delight in the very substance of paint. Washes of colour are pulled across her works to create thin layers of pigment, which she gradually layers on top of one another. Each semi-translucent layer forms new formal relationships, blends, and associations with the next,” writes curator Zali Matthews. “Throughout this process, Lavelle openly acknowledges the space occupied by each layer and the innate bodily weight of paint.”