David Serisier Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1958 -

David Serisier
David Serisier


Serisier is one of Australia's finest minimal colour field painters, who has honed his art over a number of decades and continues to create unforgettable paintings with radiating fields of colour that become lodged in our imagination as something rare, intensely beautiful and very real, but in an ineffable manner. (Sasha Grishin, The Canberra Times, August 23, 2015.)

In conclusion, let us consider Spring Breakers, an obscure counter-cultural masterpiece – a soft-porn portrayal of social dysfunction. This film is a source of ready-made colour for Serisier's … body of paintings. Spring Breakers adds another element to which Serisier reacts strongly – the fearful state of hedonistic pleasure. He recreates a range of experiences of colour from that film. If his titles are mis-directives that withhold any meanings that might help us access the real, then his final canvases are signs of sensory affect that are also deficient in meaning. If this is true, he may have achieved the ultimate philosophical aim: perhaps these paintings are fictions that are also true. (Dr. Prudence Gibson, “No Limits,” David Serisier Colour Real and Imagined, Drill Hall Gallery Publishing with White Buffalo, Canberra, 2015, P41?

Serisier's approach enacts a conceptual transfiguration of the painterly. It is a zone of transition, a passage between the space that painting has left behind and the new territory in which it seeks to re-invent itself. These paintings affirm the spirit of possibility and innovation. They spring from the desire to cross into unfamiliar domains, to explore uncharted territory of unimagined potential, to arrive in a new world and to see beyond. Our final destination, should we care to name it, is a passage of quiet provocation, a softly aired challenge to transcend the limits of the immutable. (Stephen Little “Across an Endless Prairie,” David Serisier Colour Real and Imagined, Drill Hall Gallery Publishing with White Buffalo, Canberra, 2015, P31)

When you look at his work you may realise that his accomplishment is tempered by a flood of doubt, yet there is a confidence, also, that painting can deliver the longed-for-aura - can create a hole in space to look, to think, to indulge. (Glenn Barkley, “Hello Walls,” David Serisier Colour Real and Imagined, Drill Hall Gallery Publishing with White Buffalo, Canberra, 2015, P47)

Born in Australia in 1958, David Serisier has been committed to an abstract aesthetic for over thirty years. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably in New York. The focus of his painting process has been directed towards the perception of colour and light questioning issues of materiality and immateriality. Serisier attended the University of Sydney completing a Bachelor of Arts (English and Australian Literature) in 1979. This was followed by a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) at the City Art Institute, Sydney from 1984-87, and post-graduate studies in painting at the New York Studio School from 1988-92. He received several scholarships including the Milton Avery Scholarship for Painting. In 2013, Serisier was awarded a PhD by the University of New South Wales. He has also received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Australia Council, Visual Arts and Crafts Fund Development Grant – Greene Street New York Residency. Serisier’s work has been exhibited in and is included in many noteworthy institutions and museum collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. Since the 1980s, Serisier has travelled extensively throughout Australia and to Europe, America, North Africa, and Japan. He now makes annual journeys across the United States to visit the greats of American abstraction, whilst documenting the vast visual landscape of America’s cultural and geographical extremes. Serisier is a lecturer in painting at the National Art School, Sydney.

“I’m interested in how colour relates to the everyday, even though the colours are sourced from high artist colour systems, it’s the ephemeral event as captured and presented by digital systems and various processes of re-formation.”
David Serisier in conversation with Sebastian Goldspink, (Inside) Australia Design Review, July/August 2014

“… Serisier has spent a lifetime investigating and experimenting with nuances of colour, surface and the contradictions of visual perception.”
Prue Gibson, Australian Art Review, Feb-April 2010

“Serisier is an artist who has freed his métier by its concentration to more fully engage the sensory/ physiological dimension of painterly realisation. His works have substance - literally - and while not referential they hold themselves in sentient parallel with the deeper human relations of matter and spirit so central to our terrestrial condition”.
William Wright, 2007

“His superb recent show at Liverpool Street Gallery in Sydney consisted of diptychs in which each large panel was a monochrome in a hue subtly inflected by the one beside it: for example, two panels of lemon yellow in which one was slightly bluer than the other. The resulting contrasts, in Serisier's words, ‘set up a state of subtle kinesis where the viewer experienced an unconscious equalising of the differing colours’."
Sebastian Smee, The Australian, 2007

“Anyone who has watched evening fog roll into the temperate Pacific Northwest will have some sense of the chromatic and textural articulation of David Serisier’s new colour field paintings”.
Robert Maloney, Art in America, 2003

“Field painting, unlike landscape or figurative painting is not about describing a person, place or thing. Rather, it involves an intuitive grasp of a thought or feeling and its translation to a two-dimensional surface using the colour, density and texture of paint”.
Benjamin Genocchio, 2004