Working across an expanded field of painting, sculpture and abstraction, Jonny Niesche’s vividly coloured work wraps the viewer in total sensory stimulation. The seductive, iridescent surfaces of his paintings hum and shimmer with pigment, colour that seems to float slightly above the voile surface. The effect is intensified by the indistinct edges between bands of colour that surround the dark middle ground. As one tone blurs and dissolves into the next, a silky insubstantiality of pure colour and sensation emerges. Niesche has long worked with the intrinsic relationship between colour, form and light to produce formal and optically charged works that challenge our perception of space. His painting offers a transformative formal beauty that is beguiling. The glowing neon tones and soft pastels that flow from a mysterious dark centre are finished with reflective gold rims, mirroring the viewer back to his or her self in a surprising encounter with the art work.

Niesche’s practice draws widely for its influences, including formal elements from twentieth-century art and the shiny allure of popular culture. He has exhibited a series of articulated screens filled with tonal gradients taken from the cover David Bowie’s album Aladdin Sane. The shades of Debbie Harry’s 1970s make-up have also entered his work, Niesche combining the best of disco’s theatrical, decadent aesthetic with a detached minimalism. These reductive forms that vibrate with the energy of vivid colour are often set against metal and mirror, offering shifting, alluring experiences of form, space, and movement. Materially fetishistic, glitter, mirror, translucent custom-dyed fabrics, and steel combine to offer a glamorous urban beauty. Recent exhibitions have seen Niesche produce art works of multiple panels that stretch up the gallery wall. Beginning intense and moving progressively through lighter tints, the multi-panelled paintings become wall-based 3-dimensional forms. Soft mint greens join other works where gradients of neon pastels—electrically charged turquoise blues fading into striking fuchsias—conjure up Miami sunsets, cocktails, and carefree tropical warmth. 

In 2018 a monograph titled Jonny Niesche Cracked Actor Works 2013-2015 with texts by Martin Herbert, Kristina Marberger, and Nadim Samman was published by Verlag Für Moderne Kunst, Vienna.

Niesche’s works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria; M.O.N.A. Museum of New and Old Art, Hobart; ARTBANK AU and private collections internationally.

Niesche is currently presenting in group exhibitions: Metamorphosis, Art Gallery of South Australia, November 2023 to June 2024, and 25 Years of Galerie Ron Mandos, May to June 2024. He is the official artist for the 2024 Munich Opera Festival.