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Artist fires colour into the Central City

Gallery

You are all invited to come and watch an explosive work of art take shape in the central city between 9am and 1pm this Saturday.

Ash Keating, Site-responsive painting intervention on wall above KINGS Artist Run Initiative, Melbourne CBD, Victoria, March 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia

Ash Keating, Site-responsive painting intervention on wall above KINGS Artist Run Initiative, Melbourne CBD, Victoria, March 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia

Paint will be thrown, sprayed and fired onto a concrete wall in Worcester Street from the likes of buckets, weed sprayers and fire extinguishers, as the Gallery again joins forces with Gap Filler to enliven the central city.

On Saturday 10 November, Melbourne-based artist Ash Keating will create Concrete Propositions, a huge, abstract painting on a concrete wall revealed by demolition.

Director, Jenny Harper says that Keating's Christchurch work will draw its colour palette from the surrounding natural landscape.

'We are delighted to support a work that promotes creative ways of "greening" our gap-filled central city and we hope that this work will provide a welcome injection of energy and colour into the streetscape.'

Keating is a Melbourne born and based contemporary visual artist, who has been working professionally since 2004. His practice ranges from site-specific, conceptual, collaborative, mixed media installations, public and gallery based projects created both throughout Australia, and also internationally in residencies and exhibitions in Chile, Korea, Indonesia, Japan and New Zealand.

At the time of the 4 September 2010 earthquake, Keating was Artist in Residence at the Arts Centre as part of the SCAPE Biennale and he returns to Christchurch with mixed emotions.

'Christchurch is vastly different to what it was when Keating was last here', says Gap Filler's Coralie Winn.

'He is excited about making a dynamic artwork in a city that desperately needs colour and life.'

The wall work is not Keating's first. In September this year, Keating painted a 50 metre-long, 10 metre high tilt-slab warehouse building on the edge of Melbourne's Western District Industrial Park. He used the colours of the surrounding farmland to propose what he described as 'a camouflage aesthetic for the surfaces of these imposing concrete block structures'.