JULY – JUDITH WRIGHT – SYDNEY

For the greater part of the last decade Judith Wright has commited her considerable energies to making a group of major sculptural installations.

2012 A Wake, Contemporary Australia: Women, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, collection of Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art.
2012 A Journey, 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, collection of National Gallery of Victoria.
2013 Destination, Fox/Jensen Gallery Sydney, collection of Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery.
2018 In the Garden of Good and Evil, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, currently on display at the Queensland Art Gallery until the 2nd of September.

These expansive works operate as a grand theatre in four parts that chronicle Judith’s intimate reflections on love and loss. Managing to be both joyful and melancholic in equal part, these installations have been truly ambitious in scale and vision.
Perhaps inevitably Wright would return to the closeness of painting though, in part to rest her pathology for collecting. The result of this more meditative practice reminds us of just how sensitive her involvement to material is and how, in combination with her idiosyncratic imagery she is able to make paintings that effortlessly carry personal narrative and symbolism.
In their mysterious marriage of surrealism and symbolism Wrights work reminds us of Redon and Bourgeois. Much of Wrights imagery is drawn from the shadows, the recesses of a night-time imagination though there is humour and a childlike celebration of the whimsical and the malformed.
In this exhibition Fox Jensen will present a new suite of paintings. Delicately drawn, stained and erased, these works are an elegant extension of what we have come to view in recent years as one of the most individuated and expansive projects by an Australian artist.