Subway escalator

Frank Hinder was a pioneer of abstract and kinetic art in Australia during the 1930s, working alongside a small group of influential artists in Sydney, including his wife, sculptor Margel Hinder. He spent a formative period in the United States between 1927 and 1934, where his understanding of modern art became deeply informed by the relationships between art, science and spirituality.

Subway escalator, 1953, expresses Hinder’s passionate belief in the interaction and interrelation of all things. The richly woven scene employs the theory of dynamic symmetry – a method that links the external world to mathematical pattern – to present simultaneous views of a bustling crowd of commuters at Sydney’s Wynyard station. The forms, light and colour of city life are unified within a singular central mass, a mass consisting of repeating and overlapping geometric shapes. This work was the last of a large series of subway scenes produced by Hinder between 1929 and 1953 in his search to understand and make visible the universal truths of modern life.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture