Dane Lovett

2021

104 pages
Published by Perimeter Editions & STATION
First Edition of 500
ISBN: 978-0-6486801-4-7

Dane Lovett’s flower paintings both embrace and eschew their historical, thematic and allegorical roots. Dark, often monochromatic and subtly tonal in their palette, the scores of works that populate the Melbourne-based artist’s debut book Flowers gesture towards the syntaxes of minimalism and seriality as resolutely as they do the still life. It’s an intriguing dynamic, which expands and further articulates Lovett’s culturally savvy, reference-rich painting practice.

As the curator and academic Rosemary Forde writes in her essay for the book, Lovett’s repetitions ‘each seem to emote uniquely’, his dark and muddy images allowing us to project ‘our own familiar scenes, moments, memories, aspirations, sorrows’. More than many others in the art world, Lovett seems to recognise the fundamentally democratic nature of meaning. His subjects are everything and nothing, laden and null. He offers us a rich framework, only to leave us to our own devices.