We are pleased to announce that gallery artist Denise Green is the subject of a retrospective currently on view at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen, Victioria, Australia. Drawing on Eastern philosophy, Green has developed way of painting that is seamless with a state of mind, and enables the fusion of an inner spiritual and an outer material world. She synthesizes these influences in an intuitive painting style, which gives expressive shape to ideas and emotional states that are rooted in deeply personal experiences of loss.
Green’s earliest works in the exhibition, from 1976–77, depict a single object centrally placed within a large, square, abstract field. These are part of a series that featured in the exhibition New Image Painting in 1978 at the Whitney Museum, which identified a new generation of artists whose work introduced figurative elements into the pure abstract painting that dominated American art in the 1960s and early 1970s. Her forms in these early works are characteristically simple and archetypal: a fan, a tree, a needle, a vessel. Subsequent works favoured abstract markings integrated within a geometric vocabulary of quadrants, squares and circles, until figurative elements returned from the late 1990s. Her early vessel shapes reappear in some recent works, as stable and familiar elements in visual fields transformed by her experience of 9/11.
The exhibition includes several of her latest photo-montages, of photographs taken by her father in Europe during World War II and her own meditative drawings.
In 2007 Denise Green was awarded the Order of Australia for service to the arts, particularly as an abstract painter and an author, and through her promotion of Australian art and artists internationally.
Click here for more about the exhibition.