Gallery 9 is proud to present Basic Ingredients, Adrian Hobbs first solo show with us.

As a painter I view my practice as part of an evolving tradition that has rightfully seen Painting’s historic position diminished, and by turn, liberated from the institutional strictures that both definedand maintained it. In this sense, the assumed and thus unquestioned components of a painting itself;its structural and constituent parts, become for me active, working elements (rather than it’s static ground) with which I explore Painting’s vastly altered and yet apparent undying capacity.

One example being that in my work the frame no longer exclusively sets the limit of the image but instead becomes a functioning component of it. Therefore, what the frame previously denied or alter-natively captured ceases to necessarily be negated or confined. This allows the subject to not onlyexceed its limits, but that which lays beyond the frames reach may enter the space it demarcates -the subject is no longer captured or isolated but opened to the broader context that both enables andhouses it. Similarly, through the inclusion (or exclusion) of the frame, the illusory potential of the 2D form is somehow revealed more than it is obscured. The trick if you like is laid bare.

How I’ve come to this process is through extended research into the the way a whole range of ration-al and scientific disciplines have conceptualised Chaos - that most common, dynamic and all-encom-passing of forms. Common to all is a series of principles that I mix up with the constitutional elementsof painting I list above. They act as an idiosyncratic sub-set of tenets that provide formal guidelines which dictate the possibilities for my work. Limits therefore are functioning parts that promise newpossibilities, not definitive ends and motifs are represented for their potential to be different in eachinstance, to be depicted in a new capacity, unrestricted by applied or pre-determined meaning.

It is through the combination of these Basic Ingredients that my work is realised and no show I’veproduced to date has better illustrated this. Here I seek to further exhibit the fertile differences inher- ent to the seemingly similar rather than seeking perfected representations of it. I have always found conformity to a perfected and static notion of being more restrictive than liberating.

– Adrian Hobbs, 2019