David Sequeira: History & Infinity

Artist, curator, and academic David Sequeira uses languages of colour, space, and geometry to intervene and rethink the narratives of art.

His work disrupts hierarchies of high and low art and reframes how we identify, value, and understand cultural production by exploring ideas of personal and shared histories, the repercussions of colonisation, and the need to recognise marginalised and excluded visual and material histories.

The exhibition centres around History and Infinity 2022, a shelf-based installation of over 1000 glass and ceramic vases punctuated by paintings by other artists. The paintings refer to colonial history, modernism, postmodernism, paintings of paintings, creation stories, and references to 15th Century Flemish drapery and 18th Century French portraiture — a mash-up of ideas, places and approaches that form an unlikely connective tissue via Sequeira’s colour chart of vessels.

Also featured in the exhibition is Symphonic Poem 2014, a sequence of 48 works on paper that articulates Sequeira’s interest in exploring the relationship between colour and music. Through tonal variation and repetition of geometric form, Sequeira draws attention to visual resonance and vibration of colour. _The ocean refuses no river _2023, commissioned for ‘TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili’, offers another body of paintings that combine an intense study of colour and geometry with paintings by a group of traditional miniaturists based in Udaipur, India with whom Sequeira has worked for 25 years. 

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Presented with the support of Bunjil Place

Tile and Banner Image: David Sequeria, History & Infinity, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Christian Capurro.