Characterised by areas of colour separated by sharp borders, hard-edge abstraction imparts an impression of flatness and machine-made perfection to paintings and sculptures. This style can be read as a response to the post war proliferation of industrially produced everyday objects, in which the crafter’s hand was no longer evident. Several artists in the new ‘Spectrum’ exhibition at QAG play with the principles of hard-edge abstraction, using form and colour to impart a sense of three-dimensionality, softening painted borders with hand-finished lines, or layering geometric forms with different textures.

The abstract art of the 1960s often made no allusion to any experience or subject beyond itself. This is true of Nigel Lendon’s sculpture Slab construction 11 1968. Formerly exhibited in ‘The Field’, it consists of a series of rectangular forms constructed from painted plywood that appear to delicately ‘balance’ on one corner. Lendon considered this form, which bears a relationship to the industrial principle of assembled components, as appropriate to the times. Like Slab construction 11, Lincoln Austin’s sculpture Interloper 2009 consists of repeated rectilinear forms, but it was constructed to function as Optical Art. Made from mesh grids, the planes of the sculpture appear to interact when a viewer walks past, creating an interference (or moiré) pattern.

Grids have also been employed by several painters featured in ‘Spectrum’ to create dynamic visual effects. Ti Parks’s vibrant painting Number one 1969 exemplifies Australian hard-edge painting of the 1960s, characterised as it is by repetition and variation in equal measure. Parks found inspiration in domestic spheres; in this work, he disrupts patterns he sourced from linoleum floorcoverings.¹ A grid of green squares appears to vibrate out of position — an effect aided by warm and cool colours that seem to advance and recede, and by Parks’s equivocal treatment of light and shade. By adding ‘shadows’ that are more pronounced in the lower registers of the painting, Parks gives the squares a sense of varying three-dimensionality. Likewise, areas of magenta and cyan in the bottom right of the painting suggest a diagonal beam of light cast across a flat surface, creating a visual tension between flatness and depth, ‘figure’ and ground.

Vivienne Binns also took cues from gridded domestic materials — perhaps metal insect screens or nylon flyswatters — to craft her energetic painting Wire weave plastic mesh: a paradox of irritations 2007–08. If seen from the correct distance, its patterned surface imparts a three-dimensional effect, like the ‘Magic Eye’ stereogram pictures popular in the 1990s. Binns paints her net-like designs using modified tools more likely to be associated with crafting than traditional painting, including home-decorator’s foam rollers, combs fashioned from rubber squeegees and paper stencils,² contributing to her broader mission to create accessible art as an antidote to what she considers outdated hierarchies of artmaking.
 

Helga Groves’s Lithification series #3 2021 is based on minimalist grids, yet it exemplifies the machinations of deep time and relates to her personal history. Her subject is ‘lithification’, the process whereby tectonic forces expel fluid from sediments to create rock. Groves’s layers of translucent paint create an optical weave resembling rock strata. They also give the impression that the painting has been carefully sewn or pieced together, lending a sense of duration to the work. Pearlescent splatters punctuate the painting’s orderly surface — a possible allusion to Groves’s Finnish grandfather, who was an opal prospector in the Winton/Longreach district of western central Queensland.³

Like Groves, Michael Johnson and Leonard Brown also tempered references to the hard-edge aesthetic via gestural applications of paint. Johnson’s Painting No. 3 c.1976 floats coloured bars in an expansive void. His off-kilter placement of the bars eschews the strict right-angles of several of his earlier works, instead implying a twisting, tumbling motion. By contrast, The cave, the mountain, the priest’s hat – all of these 1996 by Leonard Brown negates the machine-made perfection associated with hard-edge painting, instead separating fields of black and red with a curved edge that gently meanders with the movement of his hand. Fittingly, like this border, the subject of Brown’s painting is not hard or fixed in its meaning, referring to a selection of spiritually resonant objects. John Peart’s paintings were also inspired by spiritual concerns. In the early 1960s, he embraced texts on Tantric philosophy, Zen Buddhism and yoga, consequently painting minimalist voids that mediate the realms of the visible and invisible. After viewing colour-field paintings by North American artists Morris Louis (1912–62) and Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), Peart felt compelled to develop lively, gestural style, exemplified by his works in ‘Spectrum’.⁴ To create Colour square III 1968, Peart painted onto a raw, unprimed canvas using dry-brush and staining techniques, creating a texture that contrasts the smooth finish associated with hard-edge abstraction. Peart’s intuitive patterning and colour selection encourages the viewer’s eyes to leap in twists and turns across the artwork, lending it a mantra-like repetition and jazzy, improvisational rhythm.⁵ By contrast, Before Cook and Columbus II 1976 comprises a smoky, shifting field, punctuated by angular polygons in solid tones — switching between solid and ephemeral forms creates the impression of a vast space animated with energy. Considered within the context of Tantric philosophy, Peart‘s paintings provide fictive spaces for the mind to roam, encouraging meditative contemplation.

Linked by a network of shared connections to the ever-present legacy of Australian abstraction, these diverse works of art demonstrate the ongoing influence of visual experimentation on Australian art. 

Dr Emily Poore is Assistant Curator, Australian Art. ‘Spectrum’ is on the Watermall, QAG, until February 2026.

Endnotes

1. Charles Nodrum Gallery, ‘Ti Parks, Number One, 1969’, 2002, accessed August 2025., accessed August 2025.
2. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, ‘Vivienne Binns: Documentary film’, 2022, accessed August 2025., accessed August 2025.
3. Michele Helmrich, ‘Fenestrations of darkness and light and endless becoming’, 2005, accessed August 2025, accessed August 2025.
4. Linda van Nunen, ‘Patterns of experience: Sydney abstraction’, in Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966 – 2006 from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2007, pp.35–7.
5. van Nunen, p.37.