Wendy Stavrianos
Nicholas Thompson presents an exhibition that marks the fiftieth anniversary of Wendy Stavrianos' first solo exhibition in 1967.
To mark this significant point in Stavrianos’ career, the exhibition ‘Rage, Memory & Desire: Revisiting the 1980s’ looks to a powerful and potent period of the artist’s career.
Charged and intense, the bringing together of this series is an insight to a time of change and personal challenges for the artist. Speaking of the period, Stavrianos reflected, “Looking back, the 1980s was for me an incredible creative time, although a period of great upheaval. There was an outpouring of work over those ten years between 1980 and 1990 that expressed authentic emotions, not of the fake kind. These were so overpowering at times that they seemed to break through a wall inside me, shattering all the past conditioning that had been built up since childhood. It was as if I had come to a crossroad, where life and art merged and could not be separated. I felt then, that my passion had at last found its form.”
During the mid to late 1980s the paintings Stavrianos was producing looked to the landscape, with the artist gathering inspiration from her travels to the Willlandra Lakes in Mungo National Park, to the coast of Tanya in New South Wales and the artist’s property in Victoria.
Alongside the embedded stories of places in her works, this series of works was greatly influenced by her European travels. In the exhibition essay Laura Murray Cree writes of the influences of Uccello’s Rout of San Romano (c.1438-40) at London’s National Gallery and Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece (1512-16), alongside Jungian psychology and the feminist project of academic Camille Paglia to unite the Apolloinian male principle of the sky gods and the Chthonian body of mother earth.
Loaded with narrative from Australia and Europe, the visually intense paintings need to be experienced in person in order to be immersed in Stavrianos’ poetic abstraction.
EXHIBITION
Wendy Stavrianos | Rage, Memory & Desire: Revisiting the 1980s
Nicholas Thompson Gallery
16 September – 8 October 2017
Courtesy the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery.
Pulse, the title of his current exhibition at Utopia Art Sydney, alludes to the rhythmic equilibrium of parts that has long characterised his work. As...
Visiting Venice in late June, once the champagne flutes have emptied and the holders of “professional” badges have flown home, offers a different kind of...
The curator Con Gerakaris’s considered arrangement of diverse works conjures the distinctive cultural and physical topographies of Asia. Entering A Tear in the Fabric, the...
Walking into Anna Johnson’s studio is like passing through a portal into another world: a flight of rickety wooden stairs leads to the top floor...
After winning the Fishers Ghost Open Art Award last year for her epic video installation Margaret and the Grey Mare, 2023, opportunities across the theatre,...
Co-curators and longtime friends Helen Hyatt-Johnston, Brad Buckley, and Noel Thurgate and Gallery Curator Lizzy Galloway, selected the Buddha from Harpur’s extensive collection of Ch’an...
William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot opens with the artist pacing back and forth against the backdrop of his studio, with remnants of a sketch...
To commemorate fifty years since the invasion, Savvas travelled to Cyprus to video her walk from her mother’s home in Kaimakli, Nicosia, to her father’s...
National museums serve as custodians of collective memory. They preserve, interpret, and present stories that shape a nation’s cultural identity. The National Museum of Australia...