dele Warner is an artist living and working on Gadigal Land in the Eora Nation.

Adele Warner’s painting practice gives form to an introspective longing for connection and meaning. Painterly depictions of cultural and communal sites, become glimpses of memories from an unspecified past. These include the home and places of worship. They evoke a universal sense of nostalgia while alluding to associated feelings of warmth and security. In revisiting these scenes, rendering them with the brown stained palettes of sunbleached photographs, they become both familiar and unfamiliar, refusing audiences comfort. These scenes exhibit an unheimlich (uncanny, cold, and strange) quality, repelling viewers with the same force that drives them to seek comfort in kinship.

Works have been inspired by experiences of untethering and dislocation within contemporary metropolitan life, a lack of grounding to place or land, the abstraction of labour from tangible needs and lingering sense of malaise. Warner’s paintings, imbued with both personal and universal significance, invite viewers to reflect on their own experiences of social alienation. 

Warner’s perspective of urban pessimism is enacted through quoting historical techniques and styles of the Western painterly canon. Techniques including underpainting and glazing acknowledge the triumphs of the pre-modern painting styles of Europe, yet are contrasted by references to new developments in methods of painting, including media manipulation and digital collage. Imagery is patched together from personal photography and the boundless depths of digital repositories such as Reddit, Wikimedia Commons, and Instagram. Rendered in oil paint on canvas, they fashion a self-portrait of the zeitgeist of the digital age. In this merging of classical painting techniques with contemporary digital influences, dialogue is created between the present and a pre-internet past, investigating a disassociation from identity, community, and purpose.