Seated Figure 2011
acrylic on canvas on board
97 x 107cm
Seated Figure 2011acrylic on canvas on board
97 x 107cm
Seated Figure Study 2011acrylic on canvas
27 x 31cm
Stereo Crowd 2011acrylic on canvas on board
67 x 48cm
Swimmers Companion 2011acrylic on canvas
60 x 55cm
Victory Swimmer 2011acrylic on canvas
60 x 55cm
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Brief biography
Joe Wilson, a Sydney-based artist, has been exhibiting since 2008, during which time he has had a solo exhibition and numerous group exhibitions in Australia. He graduated from the National Art School, Darlinghurst, in 2008. His work is represented in many public and private collections.
About the works
Guardian and Child is a suite of complex figurative paintings that echo Braque, Derain, Picasso and Leger. Wilson's faceless heads, reclining nudes and isolated figures possess an air of silence and solitariness that reflect an intrinsic and expressive value, and he has developed a personalised repertoire of gestural brushwork, muted colours and motifs that are quietly insistent. His paintings demand the same openness and time for contemplation from the viewer as do those of the 'modernist' period, while resisting easy categorisation. That is, his work represents a synthesis of analytic and gestural approaches to the image, and a subtle understanding of the visual language of modernist abstraction. The acrylic painting process he employs proceeds in strict succession from light to darker colours, and this restricted palette of muted and dulled tones is reminiscent of Braque and Derain. Combined with fractured compositional planes, this produces an effect of floating and fluid gentleness, allowing painterliness to cohabit with strict form. The task of the artist, as far as Wilson is concerned, is not to create visual paradigms but to find a language that can acknowledge the impossibility of such creations. His concern is to show the way in which art – that has lost critical distance in a media-saturated world – is capable of communicating.
Works in the Allens collection
Stereo Crowd 2011
acrylic on canvas on board, 67 x 48cm
Seated Figure Study 2011
acrylic on canvas on board
Seated Figure 2011
acrylic on canvas, 97 x 107cm
Swimmers Companion 2011
acrylic on canvas, 60 x 55cm
Victory Swimmer 2011
acrylic on canvas, 60 x 55cm