Nick Offer, Remains of The Control Room, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Nick Offer
Gallery 2
Friday 4 October - Sunday 27 October
Opening Thursday 3 October 2024, 6pm - 8pm
‘Foundation Traces’, Nick Offer's first solo show since 2022, addresses his current interest in landscape as a record of human activity. Six large landscapes, focussing on the remains of the NASA Space Tracking Station in the Orroral Valley, ACT, depict various aspects of the ruins of the former station and investigate its incongruous presence within the natural arena of the valley.
The paintings combine different approaches and media to convey a visceral rendering of the station’s remains and to amplify the surreal aspect of its unlikely natural setting. These approaches include the use of stencils, squeegees, scrapers and spray paint and such media as ink, acrylic paint, toner transfer and oil paint. The paintings are studio based works based on source material (photos, sketches etc.) gathered at the site.
The approach is one that Offer increasingly favours and compares to a film maker's. In this analogy the director films out 'in the field' before repairing to an editing suite to cut the raw footage in to his vision, employing a range of techniques to do so.
A starting point for the aesthetic of the series was Dali's 'Premonition of Civil War' in which a cloudy blue sky harbours a glowering construct that casts deep shadows on a barren landscape. This echoed Offer's sense of his first encounter with the space station on a clear day and the jarring effect of the angular, deeply shadowed architectural remains on the valley floor.
A further defining element was the deep blue sky above the valley which hinted at a celestial expanse and referred back to the vaunting ambitions of the Space Tracking Station in its heyday.
About the Artist
Nick Offer is a Canberra based figurative painter whose focus is currently on landscapes. His approach to the subject derives from an interest in the way that animals (mainly humans) have left traces of their histories on the land.
The work he produces in this context encompass a wide range of approaches and media including spray paint, toner transfer, ink and oil paint and tools such as squeegees, scrapers and sandpaper as well as more traditional means.
Offer’s shift this year to landscape as a subject has garnered immediate attention. His painting (featured in this show) ‘The Remains of the Control Room…..’won the Doyles Landscape Prize 2024. His work was also highly commended at The Lethbridge Landscape Awards 2024 and features as a finalist in this year’s John Leslie Leslie Landscape Award and National Contemporary Art Prize.
