A Vibrant World
Sydney-based artist Evie Adasal presents bold and vibrant new artworks that play with light, space and perception in ‘Dopamine’, her first solo show with Olsen Gallery.
I speak with Evie Adasal on April Fools’ Day; it is also, coincidentally, her birthday. And for the first time ever on her birthday, she tells me, the sky is holding clear of rain. For an artist whose work abounds with light, colour and spontaneity, it feels like an auspicious beginning to another year around the sun.
“The need for detail with each painting became less and less. It was a natural process which eventually led to how I work today.”
Her path to painting was circuitous. Although she was always interested in the medium, Adasal devoted herself to studying photography and film instead. Then, 15 years ago, her world was severely shaken after she had two cardiac arrests. “They really had to bring me back,” she says. “I know it sounds corny, but I just went, ‘Oh my God, I have to live my life the way I would be happy to leave it if I was to die in another 10 years.’ So, I started painting.”
She transformed her garage into a studio and began exploring a figurative style. But over time, she realised this wasn’t how she wanted to express herself. Finding more satisfaction in abstraction, she eventually began introducing more hard edges into her figurative landscapes. “The need for detail with each painting became less and less. It was a natural process which eventually led to how I work today.”
Having since moved out of the garage and into a dedicated studio space, Adasal has been painting full-time for the past four years. She enjoys the tactile nature of the medium, yet acknowledges that her earlier creative interests equipped her with a strong foundation. “Photography taught me a way of seeing and seeing light,” she says. “Once you have the eye for composition, you never unsee it – you see a composition in everything.”
Her work has been described as hard-edge abstraction, but she rejects the idea of control and formal restraint that shaped the largely male-dominated abstract art movement of the 1960s. While her paintings certainly sit within that visual language, she allows her process to be led, instead, by intuition and an emotional response to colour.
“Once you have the eye for composition, you never unsee it – you see a composition in everything.”
For instance, her pieces are not planned from the beginning – each work is created by building up layers and layers of paint and seeing how each hue responds to, or plays off, the next. “So, I waste a lot of money,” she laughs. “But I couldn’t do it cheaper. It’s just my process. I keep working it and working it until I feel it’s done.” Without this sense of discovery, she finds artmaking unsatisfying, lacking a necessary sort of friction. “I was so bored because there was no push, no struggle, no excitement, no unknowing.”
This love of play and revelation is clear in her work. Colours zing and vibrate off one another: crisp blues, deep greens, sharp greys and electric pops of pink and red. Compositions are geometric, the lines clean, with canvases ranging in scale from miniatures to large canvases. Titles such as Stillness speak to the conditions that allow the artist to produce her best work. “I don’t meditate, but the more I clear my head, the more focused I am. I unclutter my mind.”
“I don’t meditate, but the more I clear my head, the more focused I am. I unclutter my mind.”
Key to this are daily walks in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, where Adasal draws much of her inspiration. The rose garden in particular has been a wellspring to which she returns again and again. She was struck by the unexpected hues of the flowers and the way they were “housed in these very rectangular, straight, hard-edge hedges, with the reds in a row, the whites in a row”. Works such as I never promised you a Rose Garden (2024) and Roses are Red (2024) aim to capture her deep emotional connection to this place.
She talks about the excitement she feels each day she sets out to the gardens, not knowing what she might find. “There was this rush that I would get every time I would go seeking these colours. It’s like this anticipation, this adrenaline – a bit of an addiction. I’d just be buzzing from finding these amazing, beautiful surprises.” She realised that this was the same kind of ‘hit’ that she was looking for in her own studio practice, and her upcoming solo show, ‘Dopamine’, at Olsen Gallery – her first since joining the gallery in November 2025 – takes its cue from this feeling.
“There was this rush that I would get every time I would go seeking these colours. It’s like this anticipation, this adrenaline – a bit of an addiction.”
For the past three years, Adasal has also been quietly amassing a string of award shortlistings, including in prestigious national prizes such as the National Emerging Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Award, Hawkesbury Art Prize and the Georges River Art Prize, while winning the Anthea Polson Gallery Award at the Paddington Art Prize in 2023. “I graduated in the ’90s, but as far as emerging artists go, I really am one as a painter,” she says. “Art prizes expose your work to broader diverse audiences, but you don’t get into an art prize and then your career changes overnight. It’s a slow change, it’s not instant.”
As Adasal keeps marching to the beat of her own drum, her intuition will keep leading her to even more incredible heights.
‘Dopamine’ is showing from 29 April to 23 May at Olsen Gallery, 63 Jersey Road, Woollahra.
