The gardener’s ellipse is a method for constructing elliptical garden beds involving dragging a stake through the soil to inscribe the perimeter of an ellipse. This method tangibly realises crisp geometric ideality in the grubby, unformed fundament of reality. Ideal and real, abstract and figurative: these are the axes that map the field of painting. Gardener’s Ellipse brings together three painters whose practices oscillate between these poles. Ellipses are useful for painters: they describe the circular mouths of vessels, such as vases and cups seen from an oblique angle. Viewed obliquely, these mouths become eyes that gaze back from the painting and conceal the whole volumes they open upon. The ellipse is a portal that is slightly turned from us; witnessable, but not passable: the index of a known unknown. The picture plane can be thought of as the point of tangency between the real world and the virtual pictorial zone: this show imagines this zone as a garden. All images open onto this garden. The garden is subtended by an uncanny physics that can hold eccentric and contradictory coordination’s between mark and meaning. Painters do not make the rules of the garden, they are subjected to it. Prudent painters do not make assertions about the garden’s properties with their paintings, they merely test propositions and routes. This show brings together the work of Annika Koops, Daichi Takagi and Ann Debono. This will be the first time Japanese artist Daichi Takagi’s paintings have been exhibited in Australia. Gardener’s Ellipse is curated by Ann Debono and will be accompanied by a zine/essay by Ann about movies, gardens, geometry and painting. Curated by Ann Debono Photo courtesy of Matthew Stanton