Guy Hepner Gallery

Nathan Paddison Unique Corn For Sale

Nathan Paddison
Nathan Paddison - Unique Corn, 2024, Mixed media on canvas

Unique Corn, 2024

Mixed media on canvas

152 x 133 cm

About this work

Nathan Paddison's "Unique Corn" presents a commanding visual field where figuration and abstraction collide with deliberate tension. The substantial canvas hosts an explosion of gestural marks, layered pigments, and forms that hover between recognition and dissolution. Paddison's characteristic energy pulses through the work, with sweeping brushstrokes that suggest both spontaneity and careful consideration. The title itself carries a playful irreverence, hinting at the artist's refusal to take artistic convention too seriously while still engaging deeply with painterly tradition. The composition builds through accumulation—passages of thick impasto sit alongside washed translucent areas, creating a topography of surface that rewards prolonged viewing. Figures or figure-like presences emerge and recede within the pictorial space, never fully declaring themselves, maintaining an ambiguity that feels essential rather than evasive. Color relationships shift across the canvas, establishing rhythms that guide the eye while resisting any single focal point. Emotionally, the work operates in a register of restless vitality tempered by moments of unexpected tenderness. There is humor here, but also genuine searching—a quality that distinguishes Paddison's practice from purely ironic contemporary gestures. The scale demands physical engagement, positioning the viewer in dialogue with the painting's material presence. Within Paddison's broader output, "Unique Corn" represents his continued commitment to painting as an arena for improvisation and risk. The work refuses easy categorization, embodying the productive tensions between expression and structure that define his most compelling canvases. This major work offers collectors a significant entry point into Paddison's evolving investigation of contemporary painting's possibilities.

Price on Application

Edition & Provenance

Year
2024
Medium
Mixed media on canvas

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Unique Corn

About Nathan Paddison

Nathan Paddison is an Australian artist based on the North Coast of Australia, working primarily in acrylic, spray paint, charcoal, and oil stick. He is entirely self-taught, having discovered painting during a difficult period earlier in his life, an experience that became the foundation of his practice and continues to inform the urgency and rawness of his work today.

Paddison's paintings are gestural and immediate, built with bold color, dynamic brushwork, and a flat, almost storybook rendering of figures such as wide eyed cats, toothy dinosaurs, and playing card royalty. His style draws on Art Brut and street art traditions, with clear affinities to Basquiat, Picasso, and Twombly, though his voice remains distinctly his own. Text often appears scattered across his surfaces, sometimes playful, sometimes fragmented, adding another layer to compositions that favor instinct and physical energy over careful planning.

He approaches each canvas with a sense of urgency, working across mixed media to avoid the limits of any single material. His subjects, whether drawn from childhood imagery or personal memory, are consistently distorted in a way meant to reveal character rather than surface appearance.

Paddison has exhibited across Australia, Europe, and Asia, and received the Kilgour Prize People's Choice Award from Newcastle Art Gallery in 2021.

Guy Hepner works with collectors seeking Nathan Paddison's raw, expressive paintings rooted in Art Brut tradition. Contact us to discuss available inventory or to inquire about upcoming releases.

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