A major exhibition spanning the 40-year career of Australian-born artist Denise Green will open at The University of Queensland Art Museum on Friday 25 November.
Denise Green: Beyond and Between – A Painter’s Journey includes more than 100 paintings, drawings, and photo-collages produced by the artist between 1972 and 2015.
Exhibition curator Michele Helmrich said the exhibition was the most comprehensive overview of Denise Green’s work undertaken in Australia and comprised her early work from the 1970s right through to recent photo-collages.
“Denise’s work takes us on a journey through abstraction often combined with a figurative element, but her early 1970s paintings and drawings and her recent photo-collages incorporate observed reality more directly,” Ms Helmrich said.
“We see it in the young artist’s wonder at the Manhattan skyline and in her recent works incorporating photographic images of the Ardennes forest – the site of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.
“Emotion, together with the stimulus of ideas drawn from philosophy, travel and exchanges with fellow artists, lies at the heart of these works.”
Ms Green, born in Melbourne in 1946, grew up in Brisbane before studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1969 she settled in New York where she completed a Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College, The City University of New York (CUNY).
Her work first gained critical attention in 1978 when it was included in the exhibitions New Image Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Young American Artists at the Guggenheim Museum.
Retrospective exhibitions of Ms Green’s work have been held in major museums including the P.S.1 Centre for Contemporary Art/Museum of Modern Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The UQ Art Museum exhibition celebrates the major gift of Denise Green’s artworks donated by her husband, Dr Francis X. Claps, to the University in 2013.
“The overriding consideration when making this gift was my early beginnings in Brisbane – this was where my odyssey began,” Ms Green said.
“I also have great respect and admiration for UQ Art Museum and its educational mission, its active engagement with scholarship and its interest in Queensland art.
“So I’m thrilled this exhibition provides an opportunity to see our gift come to life while also revisiting the historical path my work has taken and the ideas that influenced my career.”
Denise Green: Beyond and Between – A Painter’s Journey will run from 25 November until 2 April 2017.
Public program: 5pm Thursday 24 November. Join artist Denise Green and curator Michele Helmrich for a preview of the exhibition.
Download images for print and web here.
Media: Sonia Uranishi, sonia@soniauranishicommunication.com, +61 409 387 623; Sebastian Moody, s.moody@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3346 8761.
