Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today

TarraWarra Biennial

4 August – 12 November 2006

TarraWarra Museum of Art

 

This exhibition featured the work of seventeen Australian artists, and explored both the subject and processes of contemporary painting. It is widely recognised that contemporary painting is exhibiting signs of a re-energised sense of vigour and purpose. Painting has enjoyed a renewed critical interest in recent years, prompted by fresh literature on the subject.

This Biennial presented works by artists who share an openness to their contemporary cultural and political milieu. They welcome the world into their studios, whether it be through the camera, the internet, music, film, literature, a cultural landscape and media. They embrace hybrid forms, draw on diverse inspirations, while also exploring their own painterly language. These works could not have been made in any other era. They are entirely of the present.
Brent Harris

The exhibition highlights a process that is unique to painting: the artist, the painting, and their environment, occupy parallel, but related, ‘worlds’. Painters work in parallel with their own interior impulses and the external horizon of images and influences. They also work with the internal logic of the painting itself. The process is both directed and intuited. At times, the painting takes its own pathway, literally challenging its maker.

Painting today can be clustered and thought about in new ways. Artists roam freely among their art historical antecedents, across centuries, across cultures and within their own localities to find inspiration and consolidation. The art scene operates less in terms of the battlelines that were once fought between abstraction and figuration, modernism versus postmodernism, and more in terms of a network of exchange and parallel practices.