Nicholas Aplin

Lives: Naarm (Melbourne)

Necessitating a slowed-down process of looking, Nicholas Aplin’s paintings rework the edges ofAustralia’s urban landscape through studied colour compositions, restricted palettes, and flattened perspectives. His works emerge from photographs and sketches of the inner-city, where he isolates and reframes municipal structures, residential towers, community sports grounds, public parks and forgotten shopping centres. In these spaces, rigid geometries intersect with encroaching flora, exposing a quiet contradiction between architectural order and organic sprawl.

Working with a deliberately limited palette, Aplin abstracts these familiar environments into planes of saturated colour, distilling the scene into patterns and tonal shifts that heighten a sense of estrangement.

Repetition becomes both a formal and conceptual device within his practice, where subjects are revisited, cropped, and reassembled across works, allowing subtle shifts in colour and composition to suggest the fragmentary nature of memory and observation.

Rather than offering direct narratives, Aplin’s works sit in a suspended state - familiar yet distant - inviting the viewer to confront how the disconnection between built and natural environments has become embedded in Australia’s landscape. His paintings resist easy resolution, instead positioning these ordinary, often ignored spaces as sites of tension, control, and quiet reflection.

Nicholas is an expert art installer in our Delivery & Installation Department.

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