MELBOURNE.- Tolarno Galleries will present Peter Atkins’ new exhibition of paintings, collages and one sculpture, Built Form.

On display in Gallery 2, the works are derived from the Melbourne-based artist’s everyday perambulations through a variety of urban, suburban and industrial environments.

Observing a storefront, factory facade, roofline or roller door, Atkins takes numerous photographs and notes, carefully studying the architecture, decoration and signage.

Then, back in the studio, Atkins reduces the forms of these visual encounters to the fundamentals of colour and line, creating bright, hard-edge abstractions that pulse with vitality.

The exhibition begins with a series of eight acrylic paintings on board, the titles of which reveal the extent of Atkins’ wanderings throughout Melbourne and journeys beyond – Moorabbin, Glen Waverley, Footscray, Coburg.

Gelateria, Brunswick 2024 serves up six vertical stripes alternating between hot pink and dark brown, instantly evoking the flavours of strawberry and chocolate.

Sign, Clifton Hill 2024 presents as a black rectangle with a vertical yellow stripe on either side. Hazard up ahead? Atkins dares you to supply your own message.

Roadhouse, Gundagai 2024 is a horizontal rectangle divided into three sections of pale pink, mid-green and chartreuse. Crucially, the chartreuse section is narrower than the others, lending the painting a subtle rhythmic quality.

“My practice is really a meditation on modernism, in that I’m interested in how abstraction manifests itself in a contemporary urban or landscape environment,” says Atkins.

“I distil what I see down to its quintessential abstract form by deleting text and incidental imagery, but I leave enough information for it to trigger the viewer’s own memories of place,” he says.

Accompanying the paintings is a series of 20 collages, Sydney Road Project 2024, constructed from Bunnings paint sample cards.

“Built Form is a love letter to my adoptive home town of Melbourne, in particular the gloriously manic Sydney Road, an area we’ve lived in now for 25 years,” says Atkins.

“Sydney Road Project relates to the series Welcome to L.A. 2009 and Hume Highway Project 2010, both of which were shown with Tolarno. All the reference forms were harvested by walking along Sydney Road, which eventually becomes the Hume Highway at Campbellfield,” he says.

You may be surprised at how many of the visual sources you recognise from the colours and shapes alone – 7-11, Bank, Chemist Warehouse and (naturally) Bunnings.

Other works in the series claim more esoteric sources of inspiration – Madonna Electric, Fantastic Variety, Ultra Exotic Lounge, Hair 2000.

“I’m trying to make something meaningful out of nothing, those overlooked or invisible aspects of the world around us that are actually quite beautiful if we give them our attention. The humble, throw-away paint store samples I’ve used to construct the works also reflect this magical transformation,” says Atkins.

“It might be the bottom corner of a building that’s been touched up with mismatched tones of paint or an orange tiled wall that’s been repaired with the wrong shade of orange – it all combines to make Sydney Road an overwhelming and continually changing visual experience,” he says.

Completing the exhibition is Carpark Column, Melbourne 2024, a miniature replica of the Y-shaped concrete pillars supporting Peter McIntyre’s architecturally significant 1960s Parkade Carpark, which can be seen – in fact, almost touched – from the windows of Gallery 2.

“The sculpture has been installed on a wall shelf between two windows, where you get a bird’s-eye view straight into Parkade,” says Atkins of the acrylic on salvaged plywood, which is available in an edition of 3.

“I was lucky enough to hear Peter give an amazing, and very honest, talk about his practice as an architect towards the end of 2020, when the top of Parkade had been opened up for socially-distanced cultural events during the pandemic,” recalls Atkins.

“McIntyre’s columns came back to me as I was finishing the painted works for Built Form. Given the wonderful sightline in Gallery 2, I thought a single column would sit perfectly within this body of work,” he says.

“In some ways, its brutal austerity is perhaps a comment on those strange, dislocated and isolating times we all lived through.”