GARRY ADAMS & VAS RENN 

BLACK AND WHITE 

12 - 21 June 

2025

For those who know Garry Adams and Vas Renn, it should come as no great surprise that they would at some time exhibit together under the evocative title - “Black And White”.

The history of Black and White art is long and proud - an unbroken line from prehistoric cave painting to the present day - where we find opposite, yet complementary forces at play.

Black and White is often used as a metaphor to illustrate a situation which is absolute or unequivocal - and so it is - that it takes great confidence to work with this limited palette and in so doing, to embrace such unambiguous and uncompromising mark making.

A wide ranging interest in popular culture - everything from test pattern images to Black and White Sci Fi and Crash Test Dummies have informed Vas’s work for this exhibition - in fact the Dummies become symbols of an anonymous and depersonalised system coexisting alongside power, violence and vulnerability, whilst Garry’s paintings are concerned with design and the more formal elements of pure abstraction, they do also develop from keen observations of life’s incidental details, as there remains in these works the vestiges of both words and numbers - perhaps a subliminal recollection of a three quarter time huddle of Collingwood footballers in the shadows of a Victoria Park grandstand.