Director of the ANU Drill Hall Gallery Terence Maloon says the paintings in The DNA of Colour are "very evocative of dance".

And not just any dance: arabesque dance, to be specific, influenced by Matisse. While this might seem like a strange comparison between two different art forms, Maloon says Australian artist Ildiko Kovacs' work resembles "very much a kind of performative, gestural, energised way of dancing".

The artist uses paint rollers to paint on plywood, he says, to create "something quite superbly nuanced - virtuosic and expressive".

Maloon also refers to the paintings as having a "visceral impact" and notes the artist has an interest in Indian dancing, something he says can be inferred from her work.

He even says some some of her work resembles "arabesque circuitry".

That's quite a range of descriptions for works by one artist created in one method in one show. But then, art is always subject to individual interpretation - and abstract art perhaps more than most styles.

Kovacs was born in Sydney in 1962 and studied art at the National Art School and St George College. Her work has been exhibited in many group shows since 1983. Her first solo exhibition was in 1988 and she's had more than two dozen since, including in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Alice Springs.

This survey exhibition of Kovacs's work, curated by Sioux Garside for Orange Regional Gallery as well as the Drill Hall Gallery, features the artist's roller paintings from the past decade.

Maloon says Kovacs began using rollers about eight years ago.

"The works she produced in this manner have been very successful in terms of Sydney collectors or just Australian collectors," he said.

The paintings in this exhibition have been borrowed from the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of NSW along with rarely seen works on loan from private collections.

Maloon says the exhibition shows the kind of exuberant outpouring of Kovacs' work.

He describes these paintings as having "more lushness" than Kovacs' earlier works and detects the influence of American painter Jackson Pollock.

Regarding the works, Garside has written, "In thinking about Kovacs' abstract paintings I was struck by the resemblance of her spiralling lines to the coils of DNA. Her rippling forms seem to twist into a vortex or follow an unravelling double helix pattern. The DNA code is a metaphor for the way these paintings unfold and move with colour, sparked by an excavation of inner feelings and intuition...Rippling is a term that scientists used to describe the movement of gravitational waves first discovered as 'ripples in the fabric of space-time' by Albert Einstein in 1905-08."

The DNA of Colour will be opened on Thursday, June 20 at 6pm by the senior curator of Australian painting and sculpture, National Gallery of Australia, Dr Deborah Hart. On Friday, June 21 at noon will be an exhibition floor talk.