MASON KIMBER

Keystone

03 Feb 2026 – 21 Feb 2026

Keystone presents textural wall works made between 2021 and 2025 that unite the languages of painterly abstraction and sculptural relief. Originally presented as part of A Caressing Gaze at UNSW Galleries, Sydney (Kimber's first institutional solo exhibition), these works explore the spatiality of painting and its potential embeddedness in architecture.

Each work is layered and constructed through processes of moulding, casting and framing. While casting typically aims to replicate an object's form, Kimber uses it within the context of painting to register the traces of material transformations that occur at, and as, the work's surface. The works embrace moments where the casting material not only captures previous impressions but also deviates from its mould, spilling and expanding beyond its frame.

Many of the works stem from childhood memories of his father's nightclub in Perth, which during the day appeared as an empty theatrical stage filled with textural details and clues from the night before. Several of the sandy, billowing topographies that frame inner paintings are based on 3D scans of the club's custom, rounded wooden speakers. Some works contain niches that shelter cast fragments, while others combine relief and painting across the entire surface.

Kimber slowly builds up each substrate using hessian, paper pulp, extruded polystyrene and various casting compounds, assembling and reassembling materials in the studio. The works grow and reconfigure into thickened skins whose interior and exterior forms echo one another.

Through this process, they transform details from the built environment into miniature worlds that are continuously generated and regenerated. Each surface becomes an accumulation of material events that function less as an archaeological record of the past and more as a speculative dimension emerging from the wall.

– Mason Kimber