oil on linen
50.5 x 54 cm
oil on linen
57 x 65.5 cm
oil on linen
108 x 84 cm
oil on linen
60 x 77 cm
oil on linen
62 x 82 cm
oil on linen
64 x 79 cm
oil on linen
54 x 74 cm
oil on linen
46 x 51 cm
oil on linen
65 x 96 cm
oil on linen
62 x 61 cm
oil on linen
64 x 49 cm
oil on linen
64 x 63 cm
oil on linen
73 x 103 cm
oil on linen
74 x 97 cm
oil on linen
89 x 119 cm
oil on linen
70 x 67 cm
oil on linen
61 x 89 cm
oil on linen
55.5 x 75 cm
oil on linen
74 x 78 cm
oil on linen
61 x 80 cm
oil on linen
55 x 67 cm
oil on linen
51.5 x 62 cm
oil on linen
64 x 55 cm
oil on linen
56 x 46 cm
oil on linen
49 x 49 cm
My work explores the notion of time and memory. Fascinated by the question of what remains after a moment in time passes, I reference abandoned photography as a foundation for my work.
I use a combination of palette knife and brush, with a generous amount of paint. I take much pleasure in surrendering control and allowing the paint to take on a life of it's own.
The anonymity of the characters in my paintings is an attempt to avoid sentimentality. Being disconnected from their identity allows a focus on the indefinable, yet timeless, collective nature of the human condition.
Like the hazy recollections of an ageing mind, Clara Adolphs’s paintings cling to scarcely remembered histories and brief encounters between friends and strangers. The result of Adolphs’s fascination with old photos and the life stories they represent, each work is a melancholy study in mortality and the impermanence of memory.
Using photographs collected from flea markets and old newspaper clippings, Adolphs reimagines the anonymous faces and locations in thick impasto paint, working quickly to capture the stories that emerge. Male figures dominate, as Adolphs finds herself drawn repeatedly to observing how men’s experience of the world differs from that of women.
The decision to use found images rather than those from her own collection is a considered one, giving Adolphs the emotional distance to paint intuitively and without sentiment. Free to reconstruct their ambiguous narratives, she immortalises otherwise fleeting moments of human experience as something beautiful and tangible, and not easily forgotten.
Born in Sydney, Clara Adolphs is a three-time finalist of the Portia Geach Memorial Prize, the Mosman Art Prize and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, as well as the Salon des Refuses, and Paddington Art Prize. In 2015, Adolphs won Second Prize in the Outback Art Prize at Broken Hill Regional Gallery, and was named a finalist in the 2016 Archibald Prize for her portrait of actor Terry Serio. In 2017 she was awarded the Eva Breuer Traveling Art Scholarship through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Carrie McCarthy