Beyond the murky gloom settling over Sydney, the bright windows of Haymarket’s Nasha Gallery catch the day’s last thin threads of light. Inside, Swiss-Australian artist Chanel Tobler’s new exhibition, Dissolving a Marrow Economy, mirrors this shift, moving seamlessly between smoky wisps of paint and sudden flashes of colour, like a window briefly opening onto something vivid beyond the haze.
Tobler’s practice is anchored in gestural looseness, a spirit of experimentation she traces back to her childhood in Switzerland.
Scribbles, scrawled words, sweeps of paint and blocks of flat colour line the walls. Her process is deeply intuitive, and she describes it as ‘a whole universe of intelligent pathways that keep you moving forward – a way of reclaiming agency in a world where we often give it up’.
A tension between raw and learned creativity surfaces often in conversation with Tobler. ‘My experience was about being taught how to see and feel, to have a dialogue with the work, to ask what it wants – which inevitably meant asking what I wanted as well,’ she says.
Chanel Tobler exhibition – quick links
Hints of figuration
The drawings, encased in aluminium frames, remain in their own contained world, sitting flush against the dusted metal.
In larger works such as Blind Passion and Insatiable Thirst, the metallic quality even slips into the compositions themselves, the grey pastel ground quietly echoing the frame that holds it.
In line with her interest in the body and its role in abstraction, a kind of playful figuration occasionally surfaces, with faces emerging unexpectedly through her marks.
When looking more closely at this accidental symbolism in her works, Tobler reflects: ‘It’s informal and untrained – diaristic, elliptical, fragmented. It weaves through the work like a kind of scaffolding, giving it a dreamlike edge.’
The vitality of the colour red in Chanel Tobler’s practice
I was immediately drawn to the flashes of crimson warming each work, as if a soft glow were emanating from within. In Universal Metabolism, a layered red rectangle is stitched into waves of grey and black ink – a form so vivid it almost leaps from the canvas while being securely stitched in.
Red accents ripple through the surrounding strokes, bouncing off the central block and amplifying its heat. The piece feels dynamic; you can trace Tobler’s movements and follow the stitches that hold the composition together.
Across the exhibition my eye kept catching these small red moments. When I asked Tobler about her use of red, she connected it back to a childhood session of colour therapy, where an aunt told her she ‘needed red’ in her life, a vitality that now threads through her work.
‘Surrounding yourself with, and being immersed in, colour can be a form of medicine,’ she says.
Chanel Tobler on moving between mediums
Within the works there are many references not just to the body, but also the intuitive nature of her practice her iterative use of cursive letters and even certain shapes. I was drawn to the conversations unfolding between her painting and drawing, to the point where it became difficult to distinguish one medium from the other.
Flat pastel washes of colour shift subtly, blurring into pools of ink and paint, each material capturing a different moment of mediation or release.
‘Because I understand the materiality of drawing so much more, I also feel limited by paint – by the drying time, by its lack of immediacy,’ she says.
Watching these forms converge creates a kind of expansiveness, as if the work is constantly revealing and concealing her hand, strokes disappearing into flatness only to re-emerge as enigmatic swatches. It’s like Tobler leaves small clues in her works that reveal more about herself.
The immediacy of the drawings, the words and even the photos glued and stitched in, bring the outside world, her surroundings, into the works.
In the triptych with the works Building a Bible of Dreams, Council was Sought and Then we tied a string from tooth to tooth, the printed newsprint of a blooming flower and circle saw seem to break out of the organic scrawls of pastel.
This process of sifting through phone snapshots, photocopies and print-outs becomes a way for Tobler to map her internal and external worlds.
Only later, in the quiet hindsight of making, do the links between these images and her marks begin to reveal themselves.
Towards the back corner of the gallery, hung just above eye level, is a small drawing. Its aluminium frame catches the light, and the simple pastel rectangles of pink, red and brown seem to nod towards Rothko. Yet within the context of Tobler’s other works, it feels entirely singular.
Stark and distinct, its colours are unexpectedly refreshing. Looking up at it, then back out across the room, the piece reads like a semicolon – a quiet pause that links the many independent thoughts, memories, and gestures threaded through Tobler’s paintings and drawings, holding their individual complexities together
Chanel Tobler’s exhibition Dissolving a Marrow Economy continues at Nasha Gallery in Sydney until 7 December 2025.
This article is published as part of ArtsHub’s Creative Journalism Fellowship, an initiative supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
