caspar fairhall

BIOGRAPHY:

Caspar Fairhall’s art practice covers painting, painted constructions, video and interactive video art. Best known for hard-edged but painterly works with rich surfaces, much of Fairhall’s work can be seen as asking questions of the viewer such as: What does it mean to represent space in an image? How does the space in an image relate to the space and time outside the image? What does it mean to both look into and at an image? The complex, layered paint surfaces and unresolvable pictorial spaces — what curator Margaret Moore described as, 'propositions for perception' — are tools that Fairhall uses to address these questions.

Much of Fairhall’s recent work is derived from his time in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and draws on the ancient banded iron formations of the Hamersly Ranges, which date from the Archean epoch 2.5 billion years ago. Both the sense of deep time and the biological origin of these formations are central concerns of this body of work.

Fairhall is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and The University of Western Australia, amongst others.