Clara Adolphs’s Creatures
Perhaps I’ve been watching too much The Handmaid’s Tale (NB: I have DEFINITELY been watching too much The Handmaid’s Tale), but the blokes who appear in Clara Adolphs’s Creatures get more sinister with every viewing. It’s something to do with the featureless faces and muted colour palette. And also suits…a plethora of men in suits. They always freak me out.
Regardless, Adolps is one of my new art obsessions, and her new exhibition opens today at Edwina Corlette Gallery, Brisbane. Here’s a little piece I wrote for the gallery about her work:
“Like the hazy recollections of an ageing mind, Clara Adolphs’s paintings cling to scarcely remembered histories and brief encounters between friends and strangers. The result of Adolphs’s fascination with old photos and the life stories they represent, each work is a melancholy study in mortality and the impermanence of memory.
Using photographs collected from flea markets and old newspaper clippings, Adolphs reimagines the anonymous faces and locations in thick impasto paint, working quickly to capture the stories that emerge. Male figures dominate, as Adolphs finds herself drawn repeatedly to observing how men’s experience of the world differs from that of women.
The decision to use found images rather than those from her own collection is a considered one, giving Adolphs the emotional distance to paint intuitively and without sentiment. Free to reconstruct their ambiguous narratives, she immortalises otherwise fleeting moments of human experience as something beautiful and tangible, and not easily forgotten.
Born in Sydney, Clara Adolphs is a three-time finalist of the Portia Geach Memorial Prize, the Mosman Art Prize and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, as well as the Salon des Refuses, and Paddington Art Prize. In 2015, Adolphs won Second Prize in the Outback Art Prize at Broken Hill Regional Gallery, and was named a finalist in the 2016 Archibald Prize for her portrait of actor Terry Serio. In 2017 she was awarded the Eva Breuer Traveling Art Scholarship through the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
CULTURAL FLANERIE 
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