De / formed

Fan Zhongming (CHN/JP)
Hiromichi Ichino (JP)
Merric Brettle (AU)
Craig Easton (AU/NZ)

Curated by Craig Easton

April 10 – May 2, 2026  

Deformed Catalogue

Titles come before words.
That’s usually so.
Just as paintings come first.
Arriving fully formed visual things,
With language complete.

Next, it’s portioning out the words,
descriptions.
Deforming the good bits to make them conform.

About that.

It’s impossible to speak for all artists.
Is it?
Sometimes art is made to be difficult.
Increasingly, art needs to be
…belligerent.
(But only to the degree we say so.)

What of rights attached to images and objects?
Can an image have rights?
Probably only if it has the right image.
And no one objects.
What?

Sometimes mute is good.
It’s on your remote control,
your iPhone too.
Impossibility and absence take root,
take form.
There’s not much here.

Really.

If De/formed suggests a removal of Form(alism),
then what remains?
Another form of course,
and another and another,
until there’s…
nothing.
But a whole lot of it.

(This is better than nothing.)

Scientifically speaking,
what happens when it gets down
to the last Russian doll?
Is it the end of something,
or just the beginning?
Is Kaluza Klein the mother of invention?

When is De/formed deranged?
Which is to say,
is an arrangement undone, necessarily deranged?
Or simply De/formed?

DE/formed

If De/formed suggests a removal of Form(alism), then what remains? Another form of course, and another and another, until there’s… nothing. But a whole lot of it. (This is better than nothing.)

Scientifically speaking, what happens when you get down to the last Russian doll? Is it the end of something, or just the beginning? Is Kaluza Klein the mother of invention?

When is De/formed deranged? Which is to say, is an arrangement undone, necessarily deranged? Or simply De/formed?

Four artists consider their abstract practices in relation to the show’s title. Each has their own affiliation and history working with Formalist ideas and constructs while being equally engaged in the pulling apart of such things to create open works of indeterminate presence.Working through and between mediums of painting, object, drawing and video, there’s an ongoing question around what Formalist practices might mean and look like today.

Craig Easton, 2026