Grace Burzese

Exploring word associations to fabrication can quickly lead you to jazz. The constructions and assemblages in FABSTRACTION are characterised by an improvisational sensibility and an offbeat rhythm, the artists’ knowledge of materials merge with inventive studio experimentation resulting in energetic and idiosyncratic works. Grace Burzese, Sophie Clague, Michael McIntyre, Ali Noble and Nuha Saad share their personal dialogues with painting, steel, paper, fabric and wood, demonstrating that the possibilities of abstraction remain an open ended and dynamic conversation.

Ali Noble,  2018.

My Emotionalism

Airspace Projects (group show)

Exhibition runs June 2nd - 17th.

When one of my favourite authors, Siri Hustvedt, wrote an essay My Louise Bourgeois about one of my favourite artists, I got a little excited. Emotional, even. Louise Bourgeois has become the poster-grrl for many women artists, embodying and transcending the moniker of Confessional Artist. Woman Artist. Confessional Woman Artist. Mother. Difficult Woman. Hustvedt’s essay is the catalyst for My Emotionalism; an exhibition where the primary mutual endeavour of the artists gathered is to translate emotional states. And more.

The artists exhibiting in My Emotionalism, Grace Burzese, Cybele Cox,  Danica Firulovic, Ali Noble, Katy B Plummer and Helen Shelley, share compelling affinities and complexities. They are frank about the role of emotion in their practice, and they are materialists.

Eliciting feeling through colour and form. Expressing emotion through gesture, action, video, and sculpture. The artists in My Emotionalism consider the deliberate articulation of their emotional selves as a central component of their practice. Concurrently these artists are also avid object makers. The physical presence of the artist is evidenced through the visible handling of paint, clay, fabric, thread and perspex. 

Importantly, the practice of these artists cannot be simplified or confined to the disclosure of their internal lives. Greater than their autobiography, the artists also engage in active dialogues with minimalism, expressionism, feminism, capitalism, ornamentalism, high-low art, symbolism and ritual, psychoanalysis, craft and humour.

Louise Bourgeois revelled in the ambiguity of her art making. She was at once fierce and tender, protector and aggressor, she-he. Her work is the site of her emotional and psychological struggle - fear, rage, love - it is a visceral experience of the artist’s war with and love for the materials themsleves, yielding fabrics and threads, but also, resistant marble and steel and glass. I suspect her broad appeal lies within the multiplicity of her artmaking and personality.  For LB it is rarely either/or; it is usually both-and. Hers is the Janus face. Contrary. Ambiguous. Clever. Vitriolic. Loving.

My Emotionalism takes it cue from the complexity of Louise Bourgeois’ works. Hustvedt endorses artists, particularly women, to keep making work coaxed from the emotional realm. Works that are cryptic, inconclusive, personal and that have multiplicity, she undertands the drive to translate real experience into passionate  symbols. The experience that must be translated is both deep and old… It is of the body, female and male, male-female….

Ali Noble  2017

Quotes taken from Siri Hustvedt’s essay My Louise Bourgeois, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, 2016

Guy Brown and Grace Burzese

(please note photographs contain the works of both Guy Brown and Grace Burzese) 

The artist’s studio, commonly a site for romantic ideas regarding art practise and enigmatic personalities.  For most, it is a physical and psychological necessity that can be both private refuge and torment. The question around first mark, the doubt around new directions: the cliched standoff between the artist and blank canvas comes to mind. What are the possibilities when you share that intimate space?

Parallel Playground is an exhibition that evolved from the visual dialogue created in a shared studio space between artists Guy Brown and Grace Burzese.  Guy and Grace had been friends for 20 years before becoming partners a few years ago. The exhibition title refers to parallel play, a stage of early childhood development where young children play beside each other; while interested in the other, they don’t try to interact or influence one another. Parallel play is primarily an unspoken absorption of what the other is doing.

Chiefly apparent is the artists’ ongoing love of paint itself. Their deep relationship to the materiality and process of painting, is reflected in the vitality and emotional presence of the works. The collective foundation of their work is a desire to explore the expressive and sensual potential of paint, largely through colour and abstraction.

In her new works for Parallel Playground, Grace paints directly onto aluminum and introduces compact sculptures constructed during a period of experimentation in the studio. These works consider shape, departing from her previous exhibitions that examined broad open gestures. Through methods of reveal/conceal, Grace exposes the aluminium, quietly disclosing its reflective qualities.

For Guy, setting up a scrunched piece of paper or aluminium as a still life, is an avenue to explore his impression of the materials. Through a process of painterly reduction, he captures the interplay between stillness and movement. Abstraction and figuration.  Ever curious, his mark making divulges an open-ended and restless inquiry into what he calls the ‘primary essence of painting’.

Parallel Playground invokes a nostalgic reverence for the solitude and joy of hands-on studio time. As an exhibition it represents a snap-shot of shared studio play, the unconscious realisation of idiosyncratic creative concerns. The artists add, ‘We back each other, in that what is primary for us is being true to ourselves as artists and following a thread, and sometimes that means working quietly and nutting it out – not worrying about the world outside’.

 Ali Noble2016

All works acrylic on aluminium and cedar

Dimensions variable

All works acrylic and enamel on aluminium

120cm x 120cm

All works acrylic on aluminium

60cm x 60cm

I SURRENDER

I SURRENDER

FIVE FOOT SQUARE

NOT A STILL LIFE

Discussing her work, Grace Burzese talks about the freedom of painting, abstract painting in particular: the freedom to act without explanation in a field of open possibilities. Her paintings are inspired by a twentieth century tradition in which the brushstroke indicates human presence, colour is used for emotive expression and composition is synonymous with pictorial invention.

At times her work has the feeling of a spectacular outpouring. In her paintings exhibited at Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney in 2010, free brushstrokes set against a dark basecoat sparked colourfully, thrillingly, against each other. The spatial dynamics were complex: each new stroke seemed to advance further towards us than the last and this, in turn, affected our perception of what loomed behind the vortex of brushstrokes, drawing us into a void of indeterminate depth. These paintings were performances that permitted no mistakes, similar to a dancer spiralling into increasingly daring movements across the floor. The resolution of each painting involved the mastery of large, unwieldy energies. The only way to undo an action was to lay down a new base coat and begin again. In some of her new paintings this approach is still at play but more often the forms are held within a framework of uprights and diagonals. Rather than building to a central climax, the compositions hinge upon other points of tension. We might find a slowly brushed block of colour among the rapid passages, or a looping line that breaks with the rigour of the surrounding structures. Often there is a prominent void that bites back into the forms, taking the starring role in the composition.
 These contrary elements make ‘the moment of the painting’ – the way it edges into our consciousness – very provisional. Just as we feel we can grasp the image, the elements undo each other and something that seemed solid dissolves into pure thought. The jubilation of last year’s exhibition is succeeded here by an experience that is perhaps more cerebral and interior, but no less affecting. Stilling the dynamism of gestural painting, Burzese has resolved action with contemplation.

Joe Frost, July 2011

SHE SAID

SHE SAID

NEW WORK

Curated by Max Dingle OAM