David Sequeria, History and Infinity, 2022. Photograph: Christian Capurro. Courtesy: the artist and the UNSW Galleries, Sydney.

Artist and curator David Sequeira uses languages of colour, space, and geometry to intervene and rethink the narratives of art. His work disrupts hierarchies of high and low art and reframes how we identify, value, and understand cultural production by exploring ideas of personal and shared histories, the repercussions of colonisation, and the need to recognise marginalised and excluded visual and material histories.

The exhibition centres around History and Infinity (2022), a shelf-based installation of over 1000 glass and ceramic vases punctuated by paintings by other artists. The paintings refer to colonial history, modernism, postmodernism, paintings of paintings, creation stories, and references to 15th Century Flemish drapery and 18th Century French portraiture — a mash-up of ideas, places and approaches that form an unlikely connective tissue via Sequeira’s colour chart of vessels.

Also featured in the exhibition is Symphonic Poem (2014), a sequence of 48 works on paper that articulates Sequeira’s interest in exploring the relationship between colour and music. Through tonal variation and repetition of geometric form, Sequeira draws attention to visual resonance and vibration of colour. The ocean refuses no river (2023), offers another body of paintings that combines intense diagrammatic studies of geometric colour with ocean-scapes. Painted on music manuscript and displayed on music stands, the work conflates the realms of geometry, colour, music and ocean to highlight Sequeira’s persistent themes of continuity, endlessness and infinity.

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