Ben Mazey: Painting Now 2024

Ben Mazey brings a dazzling dimensionality to our Painting Now program with an arresting new sequence of painterly ceramic wall sculptures. Dripping in molten gold and sweeps of muted ivory that play out against the raw, canvas-like negative space of unglazed raku, the artist’s ribboning pieces ripple off the wall and tesselate to form optically charged installations in three-dimensional relief.

“I wanted to present works that were all anchored in the same starting point,” says Mazey, whose practice is internationally celebrated for its interplay of precision and poeticism – a melding of mathematical rigour with a dreamy, romantic, elemental amorphousness that seems bound to the organic materiality and serendipitous effects common to both painting and clay. “I’ve always seen these as big, slow ceramic brush strokes.”

True to the ambitions of Painting Now, which celebrates an expanded conception of art’s most storied medium with artists who test the limits of the painting field, Mazey’s practice pushes beyond the canvas and off the wall with its bold entanglement of painting, sculpture and ceramics. “I see these as sculptural paintings. A sculpture of a painting of a white square, a sculpture of a painting of a gold ribbon, et cetera,” he says, noting the playful, Duchamp-like remove in this approach to representation. “This is not a white stripe. It’s a sculpture of a white stripe.”

Mazey’s work has been a striking feature of some of the most evocative and directional interiors of the last decade. “I’ve always emotionally responded to Dansaekhwa,” he says of the inspiration for his Painting Now series. “A one-colour painting that somehow manages to have such depth and power in simplicity.”

To preview and acquire work by Ben Mazey, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au