David Aspden

Date of birth: 1935
Date of death: 2005
Notes: David Aspden was born in Bolton, England in 1935 and arrived in Australia in 1950. He lived and worked in Sydney before he passed away in 2005. Aspden has been described as a composer of paintings, an apt analogy for a man who surrounded himself with music - mostly classical and jazz - in his daily life. For Aspden, painting was an act of immersion, as much about the process as the creation of an all-encompassing colour environment. He had a natural facility for bringing together, in an interlocking whole, the disparate elements of form and colour from the hard-edge paintings that established his reputation in the 1960s through to the more nuanced colour abstracts of the 1970s to 2000s in which his artistic vision found its purest expression. While Aspden’s early experimentation in the 1960s with shaped canvases, expanses of uniform colour and hard-edged geometic forms gave way to a freer, more painterly style in the 1970s, some elements of his early hard-edge colour-field phase remained. These included his habit of working on a large scale, his fascination with colour and formal relationships within an image, and his interest in the idea of art as an experience, in which the autonomous object had a direct and active relationship with the viewer. Aspden's work has been included in many significant exhibitions, such as the landmark 1968 exhibition “The Field” at the National Gallery of Victoria (recreated in 2018). More recently, his work was included in the 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations, and survey exhibitions have been staged by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bathurst Regional Gallery and Orange Regional Gallery. Source: http://www.utopiaartsydney.com.au/