Anna Gore goes in through the out style

Gore’s paintings use formal qualities such as colour, space and form to initiate a dialogue with the audience and explore the open-ended relationship abstract painting bears to subject matter. Gore graduated with Honours from the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2012 before enrolling in the Master’s program at University of South Australia. Out in Style is the culmination of Gore’s Master’s research where she delved further into the history of abstract painting and how it developed and influenced the course of the modern age.

While Gore’s paintings aren’t really depicting anything in particular, which is the basis of abstract or non-representational art that she finds most fascinating, in her latest series of works elements of the representational have started to appear.

“The spaces that are depicted are a little less ambiguous and you can start to imagine true Still Life elements coming in, in some places,” Gore says. “Who knows, in two weeks I may paint them all out, but having them there at any point is very different and that’s pretty new.”

The more Gore progresses, the more she finds that the spectrum between abstract painting and representational painting is very ambiguous. While she finds that it’s more interesting painting an object than an empty square it’s still about putting paint on the surface. “It’s still formal, it’s still about the shapes and colour, it’s just that the decisions are coming from a different place,” she says.

Gore relies on intuition and inspiration to create her paintings and spends a lot of time with the works, continuously working on them and deciding what needs to go where.

“It used to just be a certain colour or a certain shape or a certain amount of the opposite end of the formal spectrum, so if there are too many big shapes I always want a small shape to counteract,” she says. “Now I might see something like an apple seed and it is exactly what I want to include and then I decide if I want to make it more ambiguous.”

Whi l e e l ement s of the representational are creeping into Gore’s practice, her works are still abstract. They are not about directing the audience but are a starting off point proposing or initiating a conversation. “It’s not really directing people so much. It’s not really moulding their minds to see what you want them to see. It begins so much more with the viewer and so much less with the artist.”

Anna Gore
Out in Style
Fontanelle
Until Sunday, June 3
fontanelle.com.au