Players

Those ridges and scrapes of green are actual paint, pushed around with a palette knife until the surface stands up off the canvas in thick slabs. Werner Bronkhorst then adds his signature twist: tiny painted figures, each one no bigger than a fingernail, scattered across the surface as if it were a football pitch. Two white patches at the top and bottom edges stand in for goal mouths. A player in a red shirt jogs near the middle, another in yellow waits up top, and somebody in a green kit lies stretched out near the bottom goal, either celebrating or having just missed.

Bronkhorst, born in South Africa and now based in Australia, has built his work around this one playful idea: what if the paint itself were the landscape? In other pieces his little figures hike up mountains of ochre, ski down slopes of white, or picnic on ledges of blue. The joke depends on scale. Once your eye accepts that the palette knife strokes are grass, the whole thing flips into an aerial view of a Sunday match. The trick is simple and he knows it, but the pleasure of finding one more player hidden in a fold of green does not wear off quickly.