Title

Graham Fransella: Paintings and prints.

Venues

Beaver Galleries [2] (5 May 2005 – 23 May 2005)

Date

(2005)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (ACT). Prints

Web address

https://www.beavergalleries.com.au/exhibitions/16…

Abstract

About the exhibition

Graham Fransella is a painter and printmaker who works with intuition, allowing any perceived meaning to emerge after the work is done. Strong black strokes trace the outlines of figures, so stripped of detail they become symbolic, reminiscent of pictograms or graffiti. In the absence of any guiding narrative, the temptation is to read these primitive or naive figures as “self”, which sets up the fundamental but possibly endless discussion about what it is to be human. Reduced to outlines, these “bodies” allow the earthy textural backgrounds to flow through, giving them a transience and often blurring the boundaries between landscape and figure. In his introduction to “Graham Fransella: Figures and Landscapes”, Edmund Capon, the current Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, writes “What his paintings do have is an echoing sense of absence; of a figure that once was there but is no more and yet it’s mysterious presence still lurks on the surface of the canvas”. The prints and paintings work on many levels without being contrived, they are spontaneous, gestural works, with any interpretation left entirely up to the viewer. Fransella’s charismatic mark-making is the distillation of several decades of draughtsmanship, what at first appear to be simple lines and primitive figures are also sophisticated, multi-layered abstractions on the cutting-edge of contemporary Australian art practice.

[Beaver Galleries media, 2005].

Last Updated

04 Aug 2024