Starkwhite will present a group show at Sydney Contemporary, from 13-16 September, featuring the work of pioneer experimental filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, along with works by contemporary practitioners Rebecca Baumann, Seung Yul Oh and Michael Zavros.

New Zealand born artist Len Lye (1901-1980) is recognised internationally as a pioneer in the field of experimental film and kinetic art. He spent his career pursuing the “art of movement” with film where he pioneered direct filmmaking (films made without a camera) by scratching or painting directly onto celluloid film. Our presentation will focus on his kinetic work with two key sculptures – Rotating Harmonic (1959) and Roundhead (1961). Rotating Harmonic is one of Lye’s classic works. From one simple steel rod, Lye coxes the fundamental principles of harmonic motions that underlie his work. ‘Well, I found I could spell out the whole business of energy being absorbed…in this carbon steel (rod).” Roundhead is one of the the artist’s most delicate kinetic sculptures comprising four concentric circles that spin in space, with a sparse ambient sound track. The works are from the the Len Lye collection and archive held in the Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, which is New Zealand’s first art museum dedicated to a single artist.

Rebecca Baumann explores the relationship between colour, light and time in her work, notably in her ongoing series of automated colour fields. The ACFs consist of grids of split-panel flip clocks, each with the number cards replaced with cards of solid colour. The result is a vast and affecting (and constantly changing) field of colour. Like changing numbers on a clock, the cards flip on each clock on the minute (on the right hand side) and on the hour (on the left hand side) – revealing the endless combinations of the palette. The title of the automated colour field works, and its link to the Gerhard Richter’s colour-chart series, points to a connection with painting. Yet while Baumann draws from an understanding of the art historical role of colour, her focus remains a study of how colour elicits emotions. We will present her latest variation, which is also her largest to date. Automated Colour Field (Variation 8) measures 1290 x 5030 x 90 mm, produced as an edition of three. The first work in the edition was acquired by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and is showing their current exhibition Toi Art .

Seung Yul Oh is well known for whimsical art works that toy with scale, but running parallel to these playful art works is Oh’s painting, a formal and sometimes minimalist practice, which the artist has described as ‘musical’ and offering moments of balance and counterpoint. We will present new works from his Horizontal Loop series where he continues his practice of working the edges, expanding on previous examples and moving away from conventional focus on the canvas. Suggestive of architectural features such as doorways or the front of a building, there are now are only four elements: simply open space framed by painted wooden bars. Made from cylindrical rods and rectangular sections of timber, these works exist as an outline of form. Here, the absence becomes content. He also exploits the expressive power of colour in this series. Oh’s reductionist and geometric compositions allow both vivid contrast and subtle nuance of tone. “I’m interested in the relationship between colours, how they sit side by side, the tension or rhythm they create. There’s uncertainty when these colours are joined. This clash, or harmony, generates a dimension of dialogue when they’re placed next to each other” he comments.

Michael Zavros paints beautiful things beautifully. His subjects include European palaces, gardens and follies; up-market men’s fashion, flowers, luxury cars and jewellery; Lipizzaner dressage horses and Japanese pedigree onagadori chickens. Increasingly the artist is turning his gaze inward, to home and self, making work that engages with beauty and the culture of narcissism. The Zavros lifestyle is depicted and documented in his art. He paints what he appears to have become – a poster boy for a life perfected. He lives an outwardly perfect life, perfectly groomed for lifestyle magazines and shared through social media – he has 95,000 followers on Instagram. Zavros’s artworks present at first glance as perfectly rendered photo-realist painting, but they generate readings and responses beyond the surface affect. They underscore contemporary society’s obsession with beauty and vanity. Like advertising, what is being created in a Zavros painting is not so much an object, a type of physical thing, but rather an artificial need or desire. “It is part of the function of narcissism — the aim of narcissism,” writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “to expose by provocation the narcissism of those with whom it comes into contact.” Our presentation at Sydney Contemporary will include a new large-scale painting of his daughter Phoebe, which is quite unlike earlier portraits in his ongoing Phoebe series, and a new still life painting.