Here the Door Ends
Sutton Gallery, Naarm / Melbourne
23 May - 20 June 2026
Sutton Gallery is delighted to announce Here the Door Ends, Marlee McMahon’s second solo presentation with the gallery. For this body of work, McMahon has created seven abstract propositions that go beyond architectural consideration, testing the impenetrable and expansive qualities of space.
In her new work McMahon invokes the stage in two ways: as a diagrammatic tool to loosely guide the pictorial framework, and as a metaphor for seeing abstraction as a site of performance. Akin to theatre’s ability to build worlds through intimate encounters, the artist produces buoyant, non-hierarchical arrangements in which entire universes take shape through fragmentary groupings. These spaces are deliberate yet unpredictable, assembled yet unoperated.
In the development of this series McMahon has referenced the experimental stage designs of early twentieth century pioneers of abstraction Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) and Alexandra Exter (1882-1949). Goncharova and Exter each synthesised folk imagery with a futurist vernacular to develop decorative backdrops for various theatrical productions, including Sergei Diaghilev’s avant-garde ballet company Ballets Russes. These experimental sketches inform the musical and spatially ambitious quality of McMahon’s new work. Colours shift subtly then intensely, and shapes reverberate with one another until a labyrinthine field of speculative ladders and coinciding circuits emerge.
As alluded to in her titles, McMahon’s abstractions wrangle with the less cogent aspects of human relations. Her use of language is often prepositional and filled with potential; here are modes in which things, feelings, ideas can operate through, in, around, over, and between spaces. By peeking through McMahon’s stage curtains, windows, screens, portals, and doorways, we are guided by authorial devices into a chartered void.
As Adorno puts it in a famous passage of Aesthetic Theory, this body of work seeks to “make things of which we do not know what they are”. In an approach that hovers between naming and obscuring, between sensation and understanding, McMahon’s abstractions savour the incomprehensibility of space, and give rise to embodied processes of looking, feeling and thinking about its permutations
More details on the show here
Contemporary Art Library here
Photography by Christo Crocker
Sutton Gallery, Naarm / Melbourne
23 May - 20 June 2026
Sutton Gallery is delighted to announce Here the Door Ends, Marlee McMahon’s second solo presentation with the gallery. For this body of work, McMahon has created seven abstract propositions that go beyond architectural consideration, testing the impenetrable and expansive qualities of space.
In her new work McMahon invokes the stage in two ways: as a diagrammatic tool to loosely guide the pictorial framework, and as a metaphor for seeing abstraction as a site of performance. Akin to theatre’s ability to build worlds through intimate encounters, the artist produces buoyant, non-hierarchical arrangements in which entire universes take shape through fragmentary groupings. These spaces are deliberate yet unpredictable, assembled yet unoperated.
In the development of this series McMahon has referenced the experimental stage designs of early twentieth century pioneers of abstraction Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) and Alexandra Exter (1882-1949). Goncharova and Exter each synthesised folk imagery with a futurist vernacular to develop decorative backdrops for various theatrical productions, including Sergei Diaghilev’s avant-garde ballet company Ballets Russes. These experimental sketches inform the musical and spatially ambitious quality of McMahon’s new work. Colours shift subtly then intensely, and shapes reverberate with one another until a labyrinthine field of speculative ladders and coinciding circuits emerge.
As alluded to in her titles, McMahon’s abstractions wrangle with the less cogent aspects of human relations. Her use of language is often prepositional and filled with potential; here are modes in which things, feelings, ideas can operate through, in, around, over, and between spaces. By peeking through McMahon’s stage curtains, windows, screens, portals, and doorways, we are guided by authorial devices into a chartered void.
As Adorno puts it in a famous passage of Aesthetic Theory, this body of work seeks to “make things of which we do not know what they are”. In an approach that hovers between naming and obscuring, between sensation and understanding, McMahon’s abstractions savour the incomprehensibility of space, and give rise to embodied processes of looking, feeling and thinking about its permutations
More details on the show here
Contemporary Art Library here
Photography by Christo Crocker
