A new solo exhibition by Australian artist Arran Russell, titled SILENT LANGUAGE, will be unveiled on Tuesday 3 May 2022 featuring a series of sculptures, wall assemblages, paintings and works on paper. Presented across the rarely accessed top-floor space of the Verona Penthouse in Paddington, Sydney, the exhibition is free entry and runs until Saturday 7 May 2022.

The inaugural solo exhibition by Arran Russell harnesses a hidden language of shapes which draws upon the artist’s past experience in the design and fashion industries in Australia, Vietnam, China, India, Japan and the United Kingdom. For Russell this meant many years working with the shapes found in garment patterns, often in places where the only shared vocabulary was in the forms laid out between Russell and his collaborators.

In SILENT LANGUAGE, the origins of the cut-out shapes of garment patterns have kept their perplexing, prone characters, floating, nudging, and nestling themselves into new and abstracted compositions. Using movement and gesture Russell delivers previously mass produced materials into a more premium environment. The exhibition presents a series of sculptures formed from clay and wood that will be shown alongside large-scale paintings and works on paper. Many of the works incorporate heavy duty materials such as tar, lead, clay and kaolin, often applied to the surface using only a squeegee and a spatula, with the resulting abstracted forms taking on a gritty and permeable texture.