Neil Shennen & Elliott Routledge.
Elliott Routledge, born in Tokyo, Japan, is a contemporary abstract artist living and working out of Sydney. He is known for his public art installations around Australia and throughout parts of the world. His work exists in a balance between expressive mark making, abstract form and small to large scale sculpture.
Routledge presents paintings and sculptural pieces which are influenced by his exterior outdoor public practice, which go from small intimate works to large scale canvas paintings that demand attention and react to the architecture that surrounds. It’s within this process of painting facades where the correlation to people and their own facades becomes apparent. Routledge takes visual data from experience, feeling, or physical objects and rearranges them into abstracted portraits of what could make up a person.
2023 SOLO EXHIBITION
GENERATIONS
Five years in the making, GENERATIONS is a collaborative exhibition of artworks by father and son in law team Neil Shennen and Elliott Routledge. A collection of hypothetical landscapes painted by Neil and juxtaposed by Routledge’s abstractions.
In 2018 the father son duo began reacting to each other’s work in a collaborative process that saw them go back and forth with ideas and thoughts on both the theme of landscape, and the abstract, and how they might react to each other. Much like the generations they come from, each artist has lived with a different set of rules and inspiration which influences their work. It’s this stark difference in their practices which has summarised and unified their paintings together on the one surface.
Neil’s landscapes are painted in the classic style of old masters and made with precision and reverence which are iconic to his peers and the generations of artists around him. Elliott’s abstractions are a glimpse into his own era in which modesty and simple acrylics are used to convey ideas fast, and direct. An unusual coupling of unlikely canvas mediums land together in these fictionalised scenes to create something new and unseen.