Dawn Csutoros is a contemporary Australian artist who shows internationally across Europe, Asia, and North America.
Her work moves fluidly between painting, works on paper, video, and sound, exploring notions of time and space on universal and existential levels. Csutoros works as much in the register of the subconscious as of form, aiming at something experienced before it’s understood. As writer Celia Lendis put it, the work is “to be felt with our insides.”
Csutoros’s practice is intuitive, but grounded in research and experimentation — shaped by meditation and other ancient wisdom traditions, particularly Daoism and its underlying tenet of the harmony of opposites, the abstract expressionist and colour field movements, a deep connection with the natural world, and her readings on quantum mechanics.
She has travelled and exhibited extensively, and undertaken artist residencies across Asia and Europe — even having the honour of receiving a blessing ceremony from Tibetan Buddhist monks in Rebkong.
Beyond the studio, Csutoros’s art is not only a formalist practice — she also responds to contemporary concerns, creating and managing cultural, community, and public art projects at both local and international levels, exploring issues as diverse as the environment, health, and intercultural dialogue. Her practice has drawn media coverage across Australia, Europe, and China, and her work is held in collections around the world.
artist statement
I’m interested in the space where ancient wisdom and modern science converge — art is the vehicle I use to explore this. Long before it was called art, it was used as information: a technology for transmission, a portal for transcendence, a way in to realms that couldn’t be reached by ordinary means.
One idea I keep coming back to is superposition — the notion that a particle exists in multiple contradictory states at once, until it’s observed. An abstract painting works the same way: it holds multiple possible readings simultaneously, and only settles into one the moment someone stands in front of it and looks. It’s an idea Daoist thought arrived at long before physics did — that contradiction isn’t a problem to be solved, but a state things can simply hold.
I look for that same instinct — holding two opposing qualities at once — in the materials themselves: matte against gloss, bright against dull, a smooth passage beside one built up in texture. I love the way colours dissolve into one another — an edge arises, and the colours themselves begin to vibrate and pulse with an energy of their own. I think of form and colour as carrying meaning beyond the purely visual: a shape like the ellipse describes a cell as readily as a planet’s orbit, and colour and light shift mood and attention before the mind has a chance to interpret them.
Working this way lets a single painting hold several readings at once — physical/material, cosmological, psychological — and treats colour as a kind of information the body receives directly. That psychological reading owes something to Jung’s collective unconscious — the sense that certain forms and colours carry a charge that isn’t only personal.
My process is slow and exploratory rather than planned. A piece often changes direction well after it’s begun — colours reworked, textures built up slowly, layer by layer, forms reconfigured — until something settles that I couldn’t have planned for at the start. It’s closer to discovery than to design: I’m finding the work as much as making it.
I will often return to painters who treated abstraction as more than a formal problem — Rothko, whose fields of colour were built to be felt in the body before they’re understood by the mind; Hilma af Klint, whose work was explicitly metaphysical, made as channelled communication from another plane; and Bridget Riley, whose precise edges turn looking itself into a physical, almost vertiginous experience.
That same attention to how colour and form move through a person runs into another discipline I practice — years of close, hands-on study of the body’s energetic systems. It shapes how I build a painting’s surface: its weight, its temperature, where it opens and where it holds tension.
Sound has entered the work recently through harmonic toning — a vocal technique with a long history across cultures — used as the audio layer in video installations. It extends the same inquiry into a different sense.
Each piece is a threshold — an invitation to enter, and to create a personal dialogue with the work.