Growing up the youngest of three sisters in the northern parts of suburban Sydney, Clara Adolphs was largely left to her own devices. With fertile imagination, she hatched a fictitious world – what she named her “natural game” – as a place to escape and explore. Today, it seems, Adophs is still playing her “natural game,” creating painterly portals that sweep us into worlds near and far.
Clara’s inspirations are diverse, from Chantel Joffe, Salman Toor and David Hockney to Vincent Namatjira, Patti Smith, Edouard Manet, and Henry Taylor. I spot cadences of these artists – the fluid strokes of Manet, the agile figuration of Joffe, the candid poetry of Smith – but Adolphs’s artistic vocabulary is expressly her own. For over a decade, she has carved out a singular aesthetic that – although her subjects are simple enough, familiar enough – is somehow difficult to articulate. Nostalgic? Uncanny? Wistful? There is a push and pull at play, a beckoning for connection between the past and the present, yet a certain imperviousness to it at the
