Wendy Kelly & Magda Cebokli
Ciphering Place
04.09.19 – 21.09.19

This exhibition presents the work of two artists, Wendy Kelly and Magda Cebokli, who have focused on a shared theme: abstraction based on the experience of specific geographic city spaces.  Although this theme is shared, as is the language of geometric hard-edged abstraction, the interpretations and resulting works are markedly different.

Wendy Kelly’s translates into painting the intensity and rhythms of the experience of living in an everchanging city whilst Cebokli explores the impacts of arriving in, and moving through, a new space.  For Kelly, the city is Melbourne ands for Cebokli, the focus of interest is Barcelona.

The City of Melbourne is experiencing rapid growth, change and development and Kelly’s body of work is influenced by the ensuing twists and turns of truncated routes, the sawing cranes, the design of contemporary architecture’s structure and its surface colour and patterning. To move from A to B is fraught, closed paths and roads, detours, heavy machinery, construction sites,  at times these pathways and constructions seem to have no logic, but can be interpreted to have a strange inherent geometry.

Time recently spent in Barcelona has provided inspiration for Magda Cebokli to produce these new works.  Spain has a rich history of shared Moorish and European culture which is everywhere visible in its architecture and art.  Responding to this, particularly the  widespread use of tiling in Barcelona, and to Gaudi’s organic geometry and orchestration of light, Cebokli’s series of paintings play with the grid, the curve and the impact of light and colour. 

This is a tale of two cities, gleaned from individual experiences. The reactions and visual interpretations of Kelly and Cebokli  are as diverse as the cities they have moved through.

At the same time, the exhibition demonstrates the richness of geometric abstraction as a means of expressing ideas and concepts. That two artists can use a similar visual language but produce such varied results is testimony to its power.