Ghosts of the thrill takes Asquith’s 2010 solo exhibition at Utopian Slumps, Storm Concepts, as its point of departure and goes on to form an extension of the ideas surrounding his most recent body of work, Joy Hallucination, exhibited as part of Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing, curated by Linda Michael at the Heide Museum of Art, 2010-11.

Asquith’s intuitive mark making on paper and canvas at various scales blurs the line between drawing and painting, creating tension in the imagery and a lexicon of hybridised visual cultures through the immediacy of gesture. His playful and emotive expression draws influence from modernist abstraction, popular culture and the fast-paced image-saturated age of digital media.

Asquith’s Ghosts of the thrill forms the next chapter in the artist’s iconography. Pivoting around the theme of ghosts of the past haunting the present, he explores the ideas of environmental catastrophe and an apocalyptic landscape through ink, paint markers and spray enamel to structure a revaluation of contemporary abstraction. The works form mute, visual responses to current global events, expressing a mood encapsulated by the reckoning of the technological, environmental, socio-political and economic climate.