Gene A’Hern’s Blistering Colourscapes
In collaboration with Melbourne Art Foundation

The dramatic hues of turbulent Australian landscapes leave an indelible impact at Cassandra Bird in Sydney.

Gene A'Hern still lives in Katoomba by the Blue Mountains, where he grew up, around a 90-minute drive from central Sydney. An image search of the region reveals an index of dramatic, mountainous landscapes and the Three Sisters rock formation, along with verdant bushland, waterfalls, and the town with its charming main strip.

It's an unexpected setting for a young artist to be based, but A'Hern is a keen hiker, often heading out into the wilderness to be with nature.

'If I go out into the landscape, I won't bring anything with me,' A'Hern notes. He chooses not to take photographs as reference images; rather, he paints from memory. 'The beauty comes from the landscapes,' he says.

'I like the abstractness of working from my memory... I don't want to be too descriptive; I want to get that feeling, more or less, not of what [the place] is, but of how it felt to be there.'

Local sites that A'Hern visits regularly include Mount Hay and Narrow Neck Lookout. He describes Narrow Neck, saying, 'you can see either side of the mountain, and it looks out into the valley,' while Mount Hay 'is completely wild, you're exposed to the elements.'

A'Hern tells me that colours appear extra vivid to his eyes, particularly in the natural environment, where he spends much of his time. 'Colours in the landscape are a bit overwhelming for me,' he says. 'It's kind of like this turbulence of emotion. Light can be really harsh, or too much,' he adds.

Though the emerging Australian artist is increasingly recognised for his outsized canvases with their vigorous marks and brilliant colours, drawing is the medium that arguably hews closer to the intuitive and adaptive nature of his process.

'I think I'm more of a drawer than a painter,' A'Hern says, describing his affinity with 'the immediacy and fullness in the movement [of drawing].' He favours oil sticks and pastels, which enable him to bypass the intermediary extension of a brush or other tool to garner a more direct relationship with the canvas or paper support.

'I'm really interested in line work and hatch work,' he adds, noting also his propensity to 'paint fast'. The resulting energy and pace can be seen in his solo exhibition, The storm that grew us (19 April–18 May 2024), at Cassandra Bird in Sydney, which features 19 new works—large-scale paintings, oil stick and pastel drawings, tufted mixed-media canvases, and intimate woodcut studies.

It's A'Hern's first show with Bird's eponymous gallery, which opened in October last year in Potts Point. Having worked for ten years at Sydney's reputed Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, which represents some of Australia's best-known artists—including Tracey Moffatt, Patricia Piccinini, and Julie Rrap—Bird's nascent programme is one that many in the local scene have been keeping a keen eye on.

Two works that stand out for their novelty in The storm that grew us are a pair of mixed-media canvases in which the artist fuses yarn tufting with ink painting. Prodigal son (after Ernest-Henri Dubois) and Sky Sonnet (both 2024) are curvaceous, abstract compositions on monk's cloth, with lines and swathes demarcated in tufted wool, while the raw cloth in between is stained with intensely coloured ink. The marks are full of vigour, resonating with spiky, unrestrained energy. In parts, provisional pencil marks can be seen through the translucent washes of ink.

Tufting is a relatively recent development in A'Hern's practice. In the two pieces here, lengths of yarn protrude to varying degrees, the fluffy pile contrasting with the flat weave of the canvas.

The process of tufting is generally slower and more measured than that of painting, with significantly less scope for the sweeping, expressive movements that dominate A'Hern's purely painted or drawn canvases. With the artist's hand weighed down by a cumbersome tool, tufting demands a level of precision and intent that is at odds with the immediate, freely executed marks of the paintbrush, pastel, or oil stick.

'It's helped me when I go back to oil painting,' the artist says. 'Tufting has enabled me to be more confident and to make decisions a lot faster.'

A'Hern's ink-and-textile works have the same high-key shades that characterise his practice as a whole—as though an overzealous photo editor has turned up his chromatic range to maximum saturation. His tendency to work on outsized cloth and canvas—often nearly three metres wide and around two metres tall—mirrors his ease within vast, wild landscapes. Of working on a large scale, he notes, 'I find it easier to track my body.'

In the vast pastel Sky Drawing 21 (2024), repeated, vigorous strokes in hues of lilac and mauve are lit from within by a glowing, amorphous heart of gold and orange lines. Hung beside the gallery's defunct fireplace, the drawing might almost serve as a stand-in for the embers that once glowed there. —[O]

The storm that grew us is on view at Cassandra Bird in Sydney from 19 April to 18 May 2024.