INFORMATION 

David Bentley is a prize-winning Melbourne-based visual artist currently exploring abstract oil painting. He has worked predominantly as a landscape painter, exhibiting work in prestigious art prizes such as the Glover Prize and the Bay of Fires Art Prize, while also showing work in commercial galleries across Tasmania, Australia. David's early work tapped into the contemplative and primal aspects of the landscape, presenting an inward and transcendental perspective of place and time.

David’s new painting series continues on this trajectory, focusing on hiraeth, the connection between place, memory and the residue of longing and nostalgia. His painting practice relies on an intuitive early-age exploration of form and colour and aims to invite the viewer into a pocket of kaleidoscopic introspection; a labyrinthine world of intersecting and merging hues, broad expressive gestures and the jarring quiet of negative space: cut-outs which task the viewer to sink into a state of meditative reflection. 

As the subconscious and conscious minds blur and weave in and out through the process of viewing his paintings, David creates an aesthetic that tugs and pulls, teetering on landscape and the representational. It is in this vague in-between that his psychological landscapes provoke the viewer to a state of agitated meditation, as geometric and amorphous shapes remain unresolved in a strange mix of the discordant and harmonic.