GUY MAESTRI The Soundtrack Of Our Lives
24 May 2010 - 12 June 2010
Opening: Thursday 27th May
Guy Maestri is one of Australia’s most championed artists and in 2009 was the winner of one of the most prestigious art accolades in Australia, the Archibald Prize. Building upon Field Studies the artist’s first solo show in Asia last year, Maestri’s new work in The Soundtrack of Our Lives builds upon the sentiment and style of the artist which has become so revered.
The new collection of paintings deftly straddles two aesthetic realms. In some the artist departs radically from his well known marks - the intuitive gestural abstractions - and instead creates paintings with a watery translucent surface, created with veils of varnish and deep layers of memory. However, the enduring interests of the artist - namely ecology, human folly and the violated landscape - are still very much the fabric of his work. In the new works the themes lie subtly behind the deceptively cool exterior, Maestri describes the body of work as “a liberation from his own touch.”
The subjects and motifs were sourced from hundreds of images found on Google, the embodiment of a world saturated with images. The weighty paintings and exquisite pen drawings deal with the cycles of nature and the notion of time in abstract fashion, for instance by representing how a glacier carves a gorge through a mountain moving at just one inch per year. Taking the viewer from prehistory, to early explorers, to glaciers cutting through mountains and finally to contemporary pulp trash imagery. Maestri’s exhibition takes us from reality to fantasy to celebrity and beyond.
Born in New South Wales, Maestri is based in Sydney and has shown widely throughout Australia with many successful solo shows. Aside from the 2009 Archibald Prize win for his stirring portrait of Indigenous singer, Geoffrey Gurrumul, he was a finalist for the Dobell Drawing Prize in both 2007 and 2008.
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