Suzie Idiens
Basel Series
07 - 30 May 2026
Exhibitions
BLACK.2 | 2025
Spring1883 Art fair | 2025
The Warriors and The Missing | 2024
Basel Series originates from a set of small sketches made in Basel after a visit to the Kunstmuseum - investigations into the formal consequences of a single intervention of a geometric form. One corner removed. A slice, a soft incision, cutting away at the edge. Each painting pursues this singular idea with precision and conviction: a dominant field of thinly veiled colour, held against a restrained incursion of a second colour at the margin. The exacting line where the two colours meet marks a clear delineation of territory on the canvas. Paint continues around the exposed cotton canvas edges, the work asserting itself as an object as much as an image.
At the core of Idiens’ practice is a phenomenological enquiry into how material, form and colour can generate an emotive response when distilled into a simple object. She is interested in the subjective nature of perception and the paradox that arises when viewing minimal reductive art - work that is selfreferential and rational in its construction, while simultaneously capable of producing a resonant experience. Colour is understood as form in itself: structural and emotionally subjective - as much a physical presence as the geometry it inhabits. The sliver of a second colour is a counterforce - pressed into the margin or accentuating the larger dominant shape, encroaching on it. The surface becomes a site of transferal, where material presence and felt experience coincide.
Basel Series is a rigorous study in singular focus. Precise and committed, the paintings offer clarity, calm, a space to think. It is along the edge, where two colours collide and hold, that something crystallises. Across the larger fields, the paintings quietly pulse.
Suzie Idiens is a British Australian Artist who lives and works on Gadigal land/Sydney. She completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Furniture Design with Honours in 1997 at Middlesex University, and studied Master of Arts in Furniture and Industrial Design in 1998 at the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited in national and international exhibitions including “Black.2” (2025) and “Black” (2023) Void_Melbourne, Melbourne; “ANU Art Collection: Conjunction” (2025), Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, “Text Re-read” (2023) Deakin University Gallery, Melbourne; “Diadikasia” (2021) Galerie Pompom, Sydney; “Visions of Utopia” (2017) Penrith Regional Gallery. Her work is held in public collections in Australia including the ANU Art collection, Artbank Australia and Wollongong Regional Gallery, as well as private collections in Australia, Europe, Hong Kong, United Kingdom and United States..
Suzie Idiens’ Basel Series at Void in Melbourne demonstrates a quietly rigorous yet playful understanding of painting as both autonomous object and relational proposition. Although each work asserts itself with clarity and autonomy, the exhibition’s exquisitely calibrated hang allows the paintings to also successfully resonate both dispositionally and poetically between one another and the surrounding architecture of the gallery. The result is an exhibition simultaneously activating the singularity of a “painting in itself” and the expanded nature of “painting beside itself” (where a relational space emerges through adjacency, rhythm and spatial conversation). It is indeed surprisingly rare to feel that the qualities that exist within individual paintings are also so resonant in and with the broader exhibition design.
Materially and conceptually restrained, the works explore a dynamic and mutually insufficient interplay between dominant veiled colour fields and carefully restrained incursions of secondary colour at the margins. The threshold where these colours meet establishes a striking territorial tension. Importantly, the way that the paint continues around the edges reminds the viewer of the necessity of the image/object dialectic in a painting’s thingness. At a time otherwise seemingly dominated by excess, Idiens’ paintings remind us of the value of sustained attentiveness to subtle difference, proportion and atmospheres of relation. Their power lies not in spectacle but in a disciplined sensitivity to how painting can still quietly and effectively think through colour, surface and relation.
Associate Professor Sean Lowry
Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies, Victorian College of the Arts
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series | Void_Melbourne | 07 - 30 May 2026
Photography | Andrew Curtis Photography
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 1, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 457 x 508 mm | AUD 2000
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 2, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 1016 x 711 mm
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 3, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 711 x 863 mm | AUD 3400
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 4, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 1066 x 1219 mm | AUD 5000
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 5, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 711 x 660 mm | AUD 3000
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 6, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 609 x 609 mm | AUD 2600
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 7, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 558 x 660 mm | AUD 2600
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 8, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 863 x 609 mm | AUD 3200
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 9, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 254 x 304 mm | AUD 1200
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 10, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 406 x 304 mm | AUD 1500
Suzie Idiens | Basel Series 11, 2026 | Acrylic on cotton canvas | 457 x 711 mm | AUD 2500