Tristian Koenig is delighted to announce the opening of Melbourne-born, Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Noonan’s GG Spectrum & Elements - the artist’s inaugural show with the gallery and first solo exhibition since 2005.

As a painter Daniel Noonan has pursued an individual and almost hermetic asceticism when it comes to his painting practice. Moving neither too slow causing stagnation, nor too fast creating ingrained behaviours, Noonan has worked with deliberate care and calculated affect, fashioning a cohesive and distinctive body of work since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1997.

GG Spectrum & Elements is a suite of new works that are the result of a recent studio move by the artist. A cathartic experience that can create a ‘block’ for many, for Noonan it had the opposite effect, liberating him from the disparate threads he’d been painting earlier, which were in many ways linked to the practice he had maintained in Melbourne before moving to New York.

‘GG’ is the initials of George Greenough - an American surfing pioneer that moved to Australia from the States in 1964. While the curious blend of biographies between Noonan and Greenough is obvious, ‘GG’ has been a trope - a springboard to making new works, rather than a proscriptive reference for unlocking the pieces in the show; painting as a practice, as opposed to the painting of subject matter or ‘something’. Despite an initial sense of incongruity between pieces, the suite of works that make up GG Spectrum & Elements bear a remarkable consistency of both touch and tone. Works such GG Transference is a compositional structure completed three times at three different scales, while two versions of Wobby Bolty painted at the same scale differ significantly in palette, composition and technique.

GG Spectrum & Elements invites contemplative viewing. The paintings slowly reveal similes between themselves over time and at their own pace. In that sense the works are kind of unfashionable and anachronistic, which is exactly where their charm lies.

Born in Frankston, Victoria in 1974, Daniel Noonan is Brooklyn-based artist that completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne in 1997. Noonan exhibited extensively in Melbourne and Sydney in the late 90s and early 2000s, relocating to New York in 2001 where he became a permanent resident in 2005. His work is held in collections of Artbank, the National Gallery of Victoria and the collections of James Mollison AO, John McBride, Joyce Nissan, as well as private collections in Australia and the United States.

*image (left)
Daniel Noona
DECAY (First version), 2013
Oil on linen, 66 x 56 cm
courtesy of the artist and Tristian Koenig