Learn about Nathan Brady, a contemporary Australian artist whose work explores abstraction, memory, impermanence, and the layered tension between gesture and stillness.
Nathan Brady is a contemporary Australian artist whose work explores the layered space between memory, impermanence, and gesture.
Through abstraction, minimalism, and quiet erosion of form, his paintings hold the tension between presence and disappearance—between what is carried and what is forgotten.
Influenced by Wabi-Sabi, urban texture, and the collective unconscious, his practice moves between intuitive layering and formal reduction, always searching for a balance between emotional immediacy and quiet endurance.
Artist Statement
My work explores the tension between presence and impermanence.
Built through layered processes — painting, erasure, texture, and gesture — each piece reflects a kind of slow excavation: a record of instinct, memory, and time.
I work across abstraction, often moving between brightness and erosion, structure and collapse. Texture is critical — not as ornament but as a visible history of change and evolution. Marks are left, buried, resurfaced, or softened, hinting at forms that resist full clarity. Colour serves as emotional architecture: bold at times, then worn back to something more elemental. Gesture is important and gives immediacy to the work.
Circularity and reuse are quietly woven into the work. I often build paintings over discarded surfaces — mass-produced or forgotten canvases — not to erase them, but to fold their unseen histories into new surfaces. This layering is both a practical and a philosophical choice: a reminder of impermanence, resilience, and unseen inheritance.
My recent paintings are informed by long periods spent in Venus Bay, South Gippsland — a coastal landscape marked by constant environmental change. Heat, bloom, salt, and decay weave their way into the rhythm of the work. Equally, time spent in cities — Sydney and Melbourne — and the layered visual noise of urban life influence the tension between stillness and interruption.
Underlying everything is a fascination with memory, erosion, and the quiet architecture of emotional spaces.
The paintings are not about fixed meanings, but about what happens when form becomes porous — when surface, story, and silence overlap.