Soft Pressing: Shoalhaven Regional Gallery

Simon Degroot

13 Jul - 3 Aug 2024

Soft Pressing is an exhibition that investigates and encourages interaction with surfaces that comprise our everyday built environments. Using strategies of formal disassembly and reassembly, abstraction and fragmentation, Degroot creates colourful and dynamic abstract paintings and large-scale murals. The artist develops his paintings from the imprinted surfaces of buildings or other textured structures as an active way to promote agency and empower individual connection with our urban surroundings.

The artist utilises a process where paper is pressed to a wall, footpath or other surface and rubbed with graphite or charcoal, creating an imprint that records a connection to the places in which we live. These traces are developed in the studio by the artist to make his large-scale abstract paintings. His works consider how, together, we can transform places through collective touch and reflexive mark making. Simon Degroot is a visual artist and lecturer at Queensland College of Art and Design, and regular visitor to the Shoalhaven.

Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, 12 Berry St, Nowra NSW

Workshop: Professional Soft-Pressing and Print Making Workshop with Simon Degroot

Thursday, 01 August 2024 | 04:00 PM – 07:00 PM | Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra NSW

Designed for emerging artists, art teachers and students Y9-12, exhibiting artist and educator Simon Degroot explores printmaking techniques