"Resonating: Denise Green"
2001-03-31 until 2001-04-29
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney, , AU Australia

Resonating: Denise Green is the second survey exhibition of this Australian-born artist’s work to be held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Denise Green Project 32, curated by Bernice Murphy, was on view in 1980, and this current exhibition brings our view of her work up to the present.

Through twenty paintings and sixty-two works on paper Resonating: Denise Green traces the evolution of her work from the monochromatic canvasses of the early seventies through explorations of black and white in the nineties to recent works characterised by more densely imaged compositions, with the fluidity and translucency of background incorporated into her trademark style. This is a touring exhibition that originated at the Brisbane City Gallery. Concurrently a survey exhibition that was launched in New York in 1999 at the Museum of Modern Art’s annex, P.S.I. Contemporary Art Center and toured to other Museums in the United States, is now touring in Europe with stops in Warsaw, Budapest and Klagenfurt.

Born in Melbourne, Denise Green left for Europe at the age of 17. She attended both the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne in Paris, and studied in New York with both Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. She first received public recognition in New York when her richly-coloured canvases holding single shapes were prominently featured in the New Image Painting exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1978 with works by artists such as Susan Rothenberg, Jennifer Bartlett and Neil Jenney. Resonating: Denise Green emphasises the artist’s complex understanding of painting that is based on a combination of Aboriginal and Modern Western approaches. She notes, growing up in Australia at a time when we were beginning to recognise the heritage of Aboriginal art and Culture, I could not help but be influenced by both the symbolic traditions of Western art and the metonymic approach of Aboriginal artists, guardians of the dreamtime.

Since 1972, her work has been the subject of 74 solo exhibitions and has been included in almost 100 group exhibitions worldwide. Well-represented in the collections of Australian public galleries, her works has also been acquired international private and public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna, Austria.

A 42 page full colour catalogue, designed by Brian Sadgrove and with an essay by the art historian Tiffany Bell, will accompany the exhibition. Support for Resonating: Denise Green and its tour has come from Ian and Christine George and Qantas Airways Limited.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Australia

Other Important Exhibitions in Sydney