Derek Dunlop’s work deals with the materiality of painting, creating oscillation and blurring between subject and object. It responds to traditions of abstraction, while subtly subverting them to ask complex questions about spirituality, utopia, and difference. Dunlop’s heavily layered minimalist paintings explore issues of invisibility, concealment, and power within abstraction, while engaging with the art historical canon both within and outside its traditional boundaries. Patterns that form the basis of his paintings are culled from an array of sources, including political images and vernacular objects, as well as acts of intuitive mark-making. Dunlop redirects the sources’ signifying power by embedding them onto the surface of his paintings with meticulous and deliberate gestures of layering and erasure. This process leaves room for experimentation and chance that requires the materiality of paint to speak for itself, concealing and revealing gestures. Dunlop’s work embodies explorations of mark making and effacement that tether between reference and abstraction to suggest a constant, yet almost imperceptible movement.