I have an interest in painting’s sense of possibility and less in its limitations. I am drawn to the painterly as an effect resulting from the modes of construction, representation and display. Increasingly, it is outward-looking and expansive, pushing its limits out into the world amongst us, and I for one, want to rub shoulders with it as I go about my daily trade.

To describe Christian Lock's work as a painting does not quite encompass the nature of this practice. He works with painting, interrogating its components and parts, examining their roles and possibilities before pulling them back together in the final object. The impulse to push past the traditional limits of painting draws a lineage from Contemporary Abstract painting to the ideas of late 1960's Modernist Abstraction and "Light and Space; art of Californian Minimalism". Referred to as "Finish Fetish: artists they aligned their aesthetics with Californian car and surf culture, appropriating new innovative industrial materials such as resins, plastics and auto enamels; the resulting reflective forms acknowledged light and space as integral considerations working to remove the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture.

His recent work employs a range of novel analogue and digital painting methods in combination with industrial substrates, plastics and resins, testing their gestural and spatializing qualities and their potential to break free from a two- dimensional plane while reassessing painting's physicality.

Sampling and repurposing a diverse range of forms, motifs and strategies from Modernism, the industrial processes and materiality of minimalism and hybrid language of Post Modernism and Pop Culture, the paintings become 'remixes'; creating new tracks from fragments of old songs, full of quiet nods to the history of painting whilst exploring its possibilities and suggesting its potential future.

It has been there for a while and I think it will stay a while longer. What abstraction can be is very fluid and this is part of its strength and attraction to me, as is painting. Abstraction is relevant in contemporary art for myriad of reasons, a part that excites me is how something can be completely abstract in one context and make complete logical sense in another context. I like the idea of deconstructing and reconstructing the conventions of painting and surfing to introduce new ways of play. One of the most prevalent in my practice has been the use of the material neoprene, deconstructing old wet suits and reconstructing them into something that looks like an abstract painting. They are very abstract in appearance but have been made from something that has been worn as a skin for aquatic activities, so in a way they are also figurative.

This work was created during an artist residency program at Sauerbier House in Port Noarlunga, inspired by the traditional Korean installation concept and the unique environment of Sauerbier House. Density difference is one of the fundamental concepts of my Gong-gan-seong (spatiality). Density means not only the physical properties of the material but also the different spatial tension formed by them. The timber, stone and cloth have different densities physically, and additionally, the structures created by the artist make the physical differences even more prominent. Also, the Korean sentiment reflected in the cloth, stone and wood creates another density difference with the Western style of gallery space. Density difference is often mistaken for opposition or conflict, but it is a starting point towards balance in my practice.

Joe Felber’s art practice is informed by cultural diversity. He has lived, worked and exhibited in more than three continents since the 1970s. He now lives in Adelaide after migrating to Sydney from Switzerland in 1980 and has spent the proceeding years living between the two continents and exhibiting in Switzerland, Germany, Cologne, Frankfurt Hamburg and New York.

In the 1990s, Joe lived in Cologne for five years as peripatetic nomad: his art practice a ‘performance’ of physical and discursive displacement. He was invited to be Artist in Residence in the international art programme at Castello di Rivara, Italy, where he was introduced to the origin of Arte Povera collection. Post 1992 his practice became interdisciplinary and acquisitive: absorbing, assembling, composing and de-composing, playing and re-playing elements from a vast collection of fragments, each a caught glimpse (a musical notation) of a moment, a movement through public/social space (the literal spaces of landscape, architecture and urbanity, and the virtual, or constructed spaces of both written and artistic syntax).

My practice centres on the intersections between pattern and repetition, textile processes and mathematics. Simple geometric forms that often feature in my works, such as grids and circles, are closely associated to these systems of order. My work primarily focuses on the materials I use and the time-intensive processes of unpicking and reconstructing that I employ. Abstraction is fundamental to my practice as it serves to reinforce these two elements. The representation in these works is the materiality and physical construction of my chosen ground, painters’ canvas: a pliable grid of woven threads. The qualities and versatility of this material challenges the idea that canvas acts simply as a ground or support for the painting.

Art or abstraction, to me, is a celebration of the love that the universe is. She is a legend mapping the geometry of eternity’s song, in order for us to know ourselves as her, able to breathe new worlds.

Systems of abstraction are familiar in every-day life as money, music and built forms. Like Music, visual abstraction connects across times and cultures, inviting individual associations and perceptions of meaning. Abstraction is a universal language.

For the artist, Space-Time-Flow is a collective of moving image and diagrams that signify knowledge about the universe. In space-time, the line defines pathways, the curve describes gravity, the wave expresses energy and colour displays interaction. These elements are the foundation of visual language. Whatever is observed, they are never not there.

The viewer brings to Abstract Art their own references and makes of its existence – something.

Released from narrative, abstraction for me is the doorway to infinite possibilities allowing my imagination to roam and my spirit to free. The intoxication of new colour/shape combinations in my paintings is a heart opening catharsis. This exchange of energy inspires my ongoing creative process.

Michael Kutschbach’s work encompasses drawing, sculpture, installation, painting video and sound. His practice is material and process-based, resulting in aesthetic/haptic outcomes that play at the borders of abstraction. The work is a playful search for forms that are new, unfixed and in a literal or suggestive state of flux. These forms are often presented as historically ambiguous and are reminiscent at once of odd, ancient cultural artefacts or of futuristic science fiction fragments whose function is long lost and left open to interpretation.

As a visual artist I have explored many different ways of expressing the numinous in my practice. Abstraction lends itself to discuss these ideas which are theoretical and intuitive in nature, enabling me, the artist, to create works of art with embedded philosophical and psychological meaning. The three artworks in this exhibition explore the mirror and text as a medium with its inherent formal attributes. When looking into a reflecting surface, one could argue that we are confronted by a witnessing presence that seems to split our conscious mind in two; the image (reflection) and the observer (the embodied individual) delving into the deeper meaning of looking at oneself.

Painting is relevant and abstraction within that context need not be isolated as the divide between abstraction and figuration is a false dichotomy. Abstraction feels liberating and challenging. Amongst the many reasons why abstraction has been sidelined is the present cultish, fashionable art institutionally authoritarian tendency to imply utility on art with concurrent and dependent socio-political narratives, abstraction with very different concerns is bound to be imperilled within this system. With abstraction It's a case of carry on regardless.

It is important to think about art more holistically than just through the ideas of abstraction. This is because abstraction is and can only ever be a visual language. The artist must still speak through the visual language, creating their own messages to transport their ideas. Regardless of the visual language which is utilised, whether it be abstraction, representational or a mixture of the both, a successful artwork, for me, is one which creates a situation which allows philosophical questions to be opened and explored, a situation which attempts to understand the human condition and its many complexities.

The desire to map invisible and ungraspable has been one of the driving forces in the creation of abstract images. Since computer was invented, our view to the world has drastically changed. There is a flood of information generated and transmitted through digital means and it is hard to capture the complex and fast flows of data. This informational chaos of data can be visualized and simplified orderly with computer based on the algorithm created by artists. The visualised images consequently become abstract, and which is a representation of the contemporary world with high technology. In addition, the digital media and a large amount of data give us a new type of an immersive sensory experience by the data visualisation with the extensibility of the digital media and the power of computing.