SYDNEY. 30 APRIL – 6 JUNE 2009.

Koji Ryui and Huseyin Sami are both Sydney-based artists who have been making work for more than a decade. Their practice encompasses performance, installation, painting and sculpture and their work has several points of similarity. Both are driven by a desire to question our rational expectation of what a painting, or a sculpture is and how it operates as a work of art.

For the exhibition both artists created new work that respond specifically to the site and context of 4A gallery. The result is two large individual installation projects that will occupy both levels of the gallery.

Huseyin Sami’s, Painter I Am Why Not, presents a new painting machine (Painting Machine No.5) from his ongoing series. Creating a space within a space, this large scale structure resembles a production line for the construction of individual paintings. Sami’s Painting Machine #5 becomes both a practical arena for activity and performance as well as an analytical environment to consider chance and control; harmony and deconstruction; and the role of the artist among this spectacle.

Koji Ryui’s Moai considers the idea of portraiture shrouded in mystery. The exhibition takes its title from the monumental physical presence and speculative origins of the enigmatic sculptures found on Easter Island. In contrast, Ryui’s sculptures are abstract and playful, he seeks to animate the moment that something becomes recognisable or unrecognisable in a similar way to hallucination or daydreaming. The work is composed from banal, mass-produced common place materials such as foil, plastic bags, household mops, chosen by the artist for their paucity and ephemeral qualities. Only partially resembling human faces, Ryui fuses light and simple gestures with these ordinary banal materials.

Since graduating from Sydney College of the Arts in 2000 Huseyin Sami has exhibited extensively across Sydney, Greater Western Sydney and Australia. He was highly commended in the Helen Lempriere Traveling Scholarship exhibitions in 2002 and 2005. In recent years he has completed several residencies in Sydney including in Artspace, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Parramatta Artists Studio and Internationally at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Japan.

Born in Kyoto, Japan, Koji Ryui moved to Sydney in 1992. He is a graduate of the Sydney College of the Arts. Ryui has exhibited in a range of exhibitions in a range of venues in Australia and New Zealand including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Space, Sydney; Firstdraft, Sydney; MOP Projects, Sydney; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; and Michael Lett, Auckland, New Zealand