This Friday night, a whole bunch of Blender artists will be holding an exhibition at Dark Horse Experiment to show off their latest art.

“Confine – Five Melbourne artists mine the possibilities of paint and sculpture through figurative deformations and social awareness.

James Bonnici’s distorted figures have been receiving a lot of attention and this new work is built off the back of his recent successes at Art Melbourne.

Combining with Bonnici’s finely rendered works are ADi Brierley’s socially aware and consciously political paintings of native animals tenderly juxtaposed with ipods, mobile phones and other types of neo-junk.

Toni-Ann Dowd’s dark and strangely oceanic masks are a confronting distortion of the portrait. They take the figurative and add a layer of concealment and detachment. As with Dan Sibley’s work, he is looking further inside the human condition rendering abstract paintings of internal organs, creating an ambiguous play between figuration and abstraction.

Nicholas Ives new paintings continue his fascination with gothic morbidity in the grotesque portraiture he is so well known for and this new work is equally Goya-esque and combines well with the group of artists chosen for this show.

Each artist represented in this exhibition is a resident of the Blender Studios. The tone and quality of the work exhibited is powerful and sobering, but meek and personal at the same time and a genuine example of painting in Melbourne now.”

Knowing these artists work like we do, and given that it is at Dark Horse/Blender, well, there is no doubt that this will be a great night. All of these artists are highly talented and we cant wait to see what they’ve cooked up for this show.

Who: James Bonnici, Toni-Ann Dowd, ADi Brierley, Nicholas Ives, Dan Sible
What: Confine group show
Where: Dark Horse Experiment, 110 Franklin Street, Melbourne, Victoria
When: Show opens Friday July 13th from 6pm til 9pm and runs til July 28th

Check out the Dark Horse Experiment website for more info, as well as the Facebook event page.