Review: Inventive and Complex

Sutherland Paintings
John Hurrell, EyeContact , February 8, 2024

In the colourful paintings, Sutherland also delights in ambiguous motifs that are slippery in interpretation, where apparent meaning lurches or spins off to one side. In an earlier show, a curved triangular wave could be a menacing shark fin; in this one, a rectangular domino might also be a couple of dice; or reversed lowercase e's hovering number nines or picture hanging hooks. Depicted horizontal ‘shelves' are often precarious (on rollers)—or become sloping—and a title like ‘back issue' can mean a magazine, political debate, or the rear surface of a woman's torso.

 

Ella Sutherland is a Sydney-based New Zealand artist, well known for her formidable book design skills, and paintings that revel in bold flat colour, female body forms, typographic intricacies, structural metaphors and a repertoire of coded motifs that comment on queer theory, women authors and pioneer designers she admires….

 

 

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