Abstraction Studio Practice – Spotlight on 5 Artists

Abstraction Studio Practice – Spotlight on 5 Artists:

Ellsworth Kelly

Elizabeth Murray

Carmen Herrera

Peter Halley

Thomas Nozkowski

Level: Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced
Ages: This course is designed for adults
(Art students aged 15 – 17 may be able to attend, please contact to discuss suitability)

• Tuesdays 17 November – 15 December 2026
• 7.00pm – 9.30pm
• MAC Glenferrie Studio | Level 1, 817B Glenferrie Rd, Hawthorn 3122

Abstraction Studio Practice – Spotlight on 5 Artists is presented by leading Australian contemporary abstract artist Samara Adamson-Pinczewski, focusing on 5 highly influential abstract artists. Following on from Samara’s popular studio based introductory Abstraction course and in the tradition of her specialist courses, we are proud to present, Abstraction Studio Practice – Spotlight on 5 Artists as practical explorations of the distinctive visual language and processes of these seminal abstract artists.

The artist studied will help participants understand that an art style emerges from developing a way of thinking. All five have recognisable visual languages, but those languages emerged from sustained investigation rather than from simply adopting a style.

One of the questions that Samara will address will be, what question did this artist keep returning to?

During this studio based class, participant will explore their own practice with Samara’s support.

This is a studio based practical course, and a wide range of mediums are available, including drawing and painting in acrylics.

Classes sizes are limited to ensure one-on-one tuition.

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski abstract work has featured in more than 90 exhibitions and she has participated in several international residencies. Her work can be found in major private and public collections throughout Australia. Adamson-Pinczewski is represented by Charles Nodrum gallery. Her paintings and sculptures explore the experience of architecture and urban space.

THE 5 ARTISTS

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015)
Kelly reduced forms to their essential shapes and colours, often transforming things observed in nature, architecture, or everyday life into radically simplified compositions. His hard-edged paintings eliminate expressive brushwork so that shape, colour, edge and spatial relationships become the subject. Kelly demonstrates how the observation of a shadow, a leaf or an architectural fragment, can become the starting point for a powerful abstract form. His work also teaches the importance of reduction and essences: paring back can make what remains more potent.

Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007)
Murray brought a very different energy to abstraction using distorted shapes, cartoon-like imagery, vivid colour, and often irregular or multi-part canvases. She challenged the conventional rectangular picture and allowed painting to become playful, psychologically charged and physically object-like. Murray shows that humour, awkwardness, narrative suggestion and personal experience can coexist with sophisticated formal thinking. Her work is particularly useful for thinking about how the shape of the support can become part of the meaning of a painting.

Carmen Herrera (1915–2022)
Herrera pursued geometry and colour with extraordinary discipline. Her paintings often depend on sharply defined fields, limited palettes and precise relationships between positive and negative space. Her minimalist vocabulary developed over decades, and she also extended her ideas into sculpture. Herrera is a wonderful example of an artist who didn’t need to constantly reinvent her visual language. Instead, she spent decades testing how far a small number of formal decision of line, colour, proportion and geometry could be pushed.

Peter Halley (b. 1953)
Halley’s geometric paintings initially look close to hard-edge abstraction or Minimalism, but his brightly coloured rectangles, grids and “cells” are connected to ideas about architecture, technology, institutions and social organisation. His use of Day-Glo colour and drawn/painted perspective gives geometric abstraction a distinctly contemporary, conceptual dimension. Halley demonstrates how an abstract vocabulary can be connected to the way we experience cities, systems, technology and contemporary life.

Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019)
Nozkowski worked on a small scale and developed highly individual abstract compositions from seemingly modest observations and invented forms. His paintings can contain fragments that suggest landscape, architecture, biology or objects without settling into representation. He repeatedly tested tiny variations in scale, colour, line, shape and spatial tension. Nozkowski demonstrates the value of looking, testing, revising and making incremental decisions rather than relying on a single dramatic gesture. He also shows that abstraction can remain connected to the observed world without needing to depict it literally.

Images

Spectrum of Colors Arranged by Chance II. 1951 – Ellsworth Kelly

Following courtesy of Samara Adamson-Pinczewski and Charles Nodrum Gallery:

Portrait of Samara

Try-Angles 2 2021 Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, iridescent acrylIc and Topcoat with UVLS on wood panel 40 x 40 x 40cm

Surface Slope 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 137cm

Around the Corner 1 2019 Acrylic, iridescent acrylic, fluorescent acrylic and UV Topcoat on ABS resin (SLA) 40 x 35 x 43.5cm