Gene A'Hern I A Curtain Through the Trees

A'Hern's practice evidences a deep awareness of our connection to the processes of nature - the endless cycle of destruction and creation. Layers of paint and coloured surfaces, yarn and acrylics overlap, creating a poetic rendition of the subject. Gestural marks are made with a combination of processes revealing an eruption of recognisable elements from A'Hern's everyday landscape: blue mountain peaks, rain, sky, and bushland. It is the light and colours of these vistas - deep greens, stony greys, and rich, peaty browns - that dominate here.The Kings Table situates us at sub-ground level, looking up at a vast tree crown, its branches outstretched. Layered areas of line and colour vibrate in the dramatic, large-scale Sky Paintings, transcending to skyscapes in hours of dark dusks and golden dawns. Elsewhere, tactile blossoms emerge from hazy washes in vast textile works. Abstract masses bump up against figurative ones, bright yellows collide with warm purples, and elusive planes of shadow and light emerge independent of a fixed horizon. This rootedness in the natural world reveals an affinity with Neo-Expressionist master Per Kirkeby, and with the 'action painting' associated with the American Abstract Expressionist movement. 

Using dramatic shifts of colour, scale and form, A'Hern's work draws attention to the constant flux of the natural world, coaxing abstraction and representation into a perpetual balance. Painting in situ, with the canvas laid out on a cliff at the foot of the mountain, A'Hern's process is in direct response to his surroundings, a practice both emotive and reactive. His dance - between color and form, figuration and abstraction, and near space and distant - suggests a worldview in which everything that makes up our visual landscape has a palpable bearing on our experience.