The exhibition ‘Constructed Painting’ was curated by Francesca Mataraga to showcase artists whose practice in painting or drawing moves into three-dimensional space. It features the work of four artists—Beata Geyer, Francesca Mataraga and Margaret Roberts are Sydney-based and Rossana Martinez lives and works in New York. The artists share an interest in creating three-dimensional work—‘expanded painting’ or ‘expanded drawing’—that engages with and responds to the architecture of the gallery space, in this case Kudos Gallery in Sydney.
Expanded painting is what the 2007 Symposium held at Artspace (Sydney) referred to as ‘the spatialisation of painting and the proper name of installation art’.1 A focus of this kind of work is the integration of pictorial space into ‘real’ space—for instance, through the use of line, colour, composition and shape that are not restricted to a contained illusory space, but respond and acknowledge the architectural space itself. Or, as in Mataraga’s and Martinez’s works, the placement of found objects in space asks the audience to consider the objects as coloured shapes on a 3D canvas that is the space of the gallery itself.
Expanded painting/drawing does not restrict its ground and reality to a rectangular canvas, or a piece of paper, as ‘spatially autonomous’ works (as Roberts calls them) do, but rather integrates physical space into the process of constructing illusory space, blurring the distinction between the two.
On entering the gallery to view this show, the audience was initially confronted with the flat whiteness of a dividing wall. We were then led to Rossana Martinez’s Capturing Minds. This interactive piece asked that we choose a balloon of our favourite colour from a glass jar, blow it up, and add it