Paul Snell is a contemporary artist based in Launceston, Tasmania. Snell’s practice employs digital techniques to explore abstraction and minimalism within photo-based media.
Assembled primarily with chromatic prints mounted on plexiglass, each work investigates the scope of photographic-based work by manipulating digital colour fields to develop new and experimental visual forms. Each series explores the values of unique colour relationships through aspects of repetition, rhythm, amalgamation and sequence.
Snell is influenced by the modernist artists of the 20th Century, echoing the pursuit of representing the intrinsic elements of visual aesthetics through process of refinement and reduction. Through flawless digital assemblage, Snell helps draw attention to the innate characteristics of modern fabricated materials, including qualities of precision and simplicity.
Compositions capture numerous dichotomies and questions that underpin contemporary photographic arts practice, drawing on tensions between digital and analogue design, mechanical and manual fabrication, as well as combining intangible concepts within a physical form. In doing so, Snell produces contemplative and engaging works that simultaneously draw the viewer in as well as push them away, offering an endlessly evolving space of infinite optical possibilities, yet shielded by a flawless visual barrier or void, empty of human interaction or trace.
Snell has exhibited throughout Australia, as well as the United States and Europe. His work is held in important private and public collections both nationally and internationally, including Art Bank, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Justin House Museum. Snell has been a finalist in numerous art prizes including The Blake Prize (2011,2018), The Geelong Print Prize (2011), and The Glover Prize (2013,2018, 2019, 2021).
Snell has been chosen as the to winner the following art prizes: Tidal Art Prize (2012), The Flanagan (2012), Whyalla Art Prize (2015) and Morton Bay Art Award (2015).
Exhibitions
