Working across an expanded field of painting, sculpture and abstraction, Jonny Niesche’s vividly coloured work wraps the viewer in total sensory stimulation. The seductive, iridescent surfaces of his paintings hum and shimmer with pigment, colour that seems to float slightly above the voile surface. The effect is intensified by the indistinct edges between bands of colour that surround the dark middle ground. As one tone blurs and dissolves into the next, a silky insubstantiality of pure colour and sensation emerges. Niesche has long worked with the intrinsic relationship between colour, form and light to produce formal and optically charged works that challenge our perception of space. His painting offers a transformative formal beauty that is beguiling. The glowing neon tones and soft pastels that flow from a mysterious dark centre are finished with reflective gold rims, mirroring the viewer back to his or her self in a surprising encounter with the artwork.
Niesche’s practice draws widely for its influences, including formal elements from twentieth-century art and the shiny allure of popular culture. He has exhibited a series of articulated screens filled with tonal gradients taken from the cover of David Bowie’s album Aladdin Sane. The shades of Debbie Harry’s 1970s make-up have also entered his work, Niesche combining the best of disco’s theatrical, decadent aesthetic with a detached minimalism. These reductive forms that vibrate with the energy of vivid colour are often set against metal and mirror, offering shifting, alluring experiences of form, space, and movement. Materially fetishistic, glitter, mirror, translucent custom-dyed fabrics, and steel combine to offer a glamorous urban beauty. Recent exhibitions have seen Niesche produce art works of multiple panels that stretch up the gallery wall. Beginning intensely and moving progressively through lighter tints, the multi-panelled paintings become wall-based 3-dimensional forms. Soft mint greens join other works where gradients of neon pastels—electrically charged turquoise blues fading into striking fuchsias—conjure up Miami sunsets, cocktails, and carefree tropical warmth.
Jonny Niesche’s fascination with colors, mirrors and glitter began back in his childhood in the early 1980s when he and his mother visited the cosmetics section of a department store in Sydney. In the geometrically abstract works by the Australian artist created from 2013 to 2018 and documented in this publication, the aesthetic aspect of the materials used plays a major role. Niesche works with flat, polished, mirrored surfaces, welded steel fittings, fabrics in soft pastel tones, and creates meditative image-objects in which sculptural and pictorial tendencies are combined. In his works based on color and light, the artist experiments with processes of visual perception. Through the glittering and mirroring surfaces, the works involve the viewer? and in this regard Niesche’s objects and installations are reminiscent of American Minimal Art and artists such as Larry Bell, Donald Judd and John McCracken. Furthermore, Niesche’s artistic production is rich in references to the Glam Rock of the 1970s, most notably David Bowie or Debbie Harry.
