All photos: Elizabeth Barsham
Exhibition of old and new paintings by Elizabeth Barsham
Nolan Art Gallery and School, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart
13 June – 23 July 2014; official opening 6pm Friday 13 June
website: www.tasmanian-gothic.com
GOTHIC DRAMA TO DELIGHT AND DISTURB
Elizabeth Barsham’s latest exhibition of unique, amazing and frightening oil paintings opens at Nolan Art Gallery, opposite the Long Gallery at the Salamanca Arts Centre on Friday 13th June, an auspicious date for an artist with decidedly Gothic leanings.
Barsham works in a in a meticulous, illustrative style that makes her pictures immediately accessible. Precisely painted with sweeping lines in a powerful rhythm, they combine solid design with an illusion of infinite depth. Her ability to produce a dramatic, disturbing image is matched by superb drawing and confident technique which never becomes slick or superficial.
Central to this exhibition is Bridge, hung in the Blake Prize exhibition in 1987 and now exhibited for the first time in Hobart. It shows a heaving, writhing mass of bodies, vegetation and nameless,
floating flesh painted in rich reds and golds. Beyond the bridge it is just possible to make out regular, orderly shapes of city buildings and the spire of a church. The city can be seen as an island of civilised order amid chaos or as an impersonal machine sucking the natural world into its insatiable maw.
Barsham’s paintings frequently address social issues – dispossession, consumerism, environmental destruction. Distressed figures have their passage blocked by a netting Fence; a gun-toting King of the Castle defends his possessions and a traditional family group contemplates the Suburban Dream of home ownership. However, all these images are open to different interpretations; whichever you choose will be correct. Barsham’s work is deliberately ambiguous.
Personal History is a review of Barsham’s paintings from various stages in her career, from 1987 until 2014. Indeed, The Caravan Moves On, which shows a parade of nondescript characters moving their herds and possessions from somewhere they don’t want to be to somewhere more desirable has been completed just in time for this exhibition.
Highly finished and dense in detail, Barsham’s paintings are not for the faint-hearted. Beneath the decorative exterior lies a deep and intelligent concern with human nature, exploring those nameless images and nebulous darknesses that creep over one in unguarded moments. Nothing is quite as simple as it appears at first glance; each intricate painting amply repays careful study.
Paintings range in size from about 30 cm x 40 cm to 122 cm x 183 cm and are priced at between $1,800 and $6,000.
Nolan Art Gallery and School, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart
