With a scattering of mobile phone towers, buildings, graces, pyramids, plants and animals, artist Fred Fowler creates his own visual language to create a symbolic landscape. His distinctive style of fragmented and easily identifiable objects against a flat background, like scattered like toys in a sandpit, or a sparse steam-rollered world!

Signifying Landscapes at Sophie Gannon Gallery is Fred’s latest body of work, where he presents his shorthand visual language to create subtly disorienting scenes. The bright and cheery tones of the gem-like objects present a false sense of innocence, but a closer look at the paintings reveal human inequality and suffering.

Fred’s paintings are created over an extended period, with the layering of shapes and symbols on the canvas. After constructing this dense and jostling terrain, the artist paints over the surface with a single colours, with only select objects selected to peek out. What lies beneath is obscured from the viewer, but the knowledge of what is hidden is unsettling and intriguing. While you will never know the secret of this painterly archeology site, the works offer a peek into this unknown landscape, and what rises to the surface tells its own, fragmented, story.

Signifying Landscapes by Fred Fowler
Sophie Gannon 
November 6 -23rd 
2 Albert Street 
Richmond 
Victoria