Basil Papoutsidis’ latest exhibition, Shut Lines, continues the artist’s intuitive exploration of industrial forms and processes. In this body of work, Papoutsidis revises sculptural traditions from the vantage point of vehicular forms. The artist’s formalist constructions are cut and fused using automotive finishes and engineered colours. Constructed from aluminium, fractured lines deviate the organic to the geometric.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby comes to mind here – Tom Wolfe’s 1965 collection of essays on custom car culture. In this widely lauded text, Wolfe captured the vibrancy of his subject, as well as breaking and setting alternative ‘rules’ in a writing style defined at New Journalism. Just as Wolfe tinkered with conventions of capitalisation, italics, exclamation marks et al, Papoutsidis transforms sculptural formalism through an alternative, intuitive lens of automotive techniques and finishes. The work sits in an arena where theoretical design principles face-off with the realities of construction, and where materials are re-modelled through continuous transformation.

Basil Papoutsidis is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice facilitates a fanaticism with the behaviours of steel and the sculptural contexts of formalist abstraction. Papoutsidis completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne (VCA) in 2014.