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Email PagePenetrol
October 15, 2005- November 12, 2005
Stephen Bush
Goff+Rosenthal
537B W 23rd StGoff + Rosenthal is pleased to present a new series of paintings by Australian artist Stephen Bush entitled Penetrol, the first exhibition of Bush’s work to be held in New York in almost a decade.
The five paintings that comprise the exhibition are each large, 72 x 72-inch square canvasses depicting mostly rustic buildings and structures set against a mountainous landscape. The representational elements in the canvas are situated in an abstract swirl of lurid, highly contrasting colors. To enhance the jarring color contrasts, Bush has mixed enamel into the paint to create a slick, almost reflective finish. Both representational and abstract, Bush’s paintings engage the viewer on a formal level as well as in terms of content.
“Each of these paintings,” says Bush, “was developed ever mindful of the word ‘desire’and its many and varied implications. What is most important in these works is that part which is unexplainable -- that part which is driven by the unconscious. The meaning can be found more in the process I use than in any other part.”
In making each painting, there are two stages in the development of the work. First, Bush pours paint directly onto the canvas, allowing a freeform image to appear. Next, Bush begins to develop a narrative out of the abstract and accidental forms. Says Bush, “I work to discover or manipulate figurative elements with the information that presents itself in the ground. For all of the paintings in Penetrol, I have continued my fascination with alpine vistas, mountainous locations and home structures. I see the mountain vista as a metaphor for life's accent--or quest for fulfillment, whether personal, spiritual or otherwise. In short, these mountains represent any person’s soaring ambitions. Set against this is the image of a dwelling, a crude or fanciful form of shelter individualized to meet our particular needs.”
In other bodies of work, Stephen Bush has used his paintings to explore formal concerns of his medium as well as philosophical, historical and political issues and ideas. Curator Dan Cameron has written of Bush that his “art helps remind us that the dismantling of modernist strategies for creating works of art has unexpectedly brought the possibility of narrative into an entirely unforeseen prominence.”
In 1991-92 Stephen Bush’s work was the subject of a traveling museum exhibition entitled “Claiming: An Installation of Paintings by Stephen Bush” at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, the Contemporary Art Center of South Australia, Adelaide and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut. He also had a solo exhibition more recently at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. His work is in the collections of most of the major Australian museums and in numerous private collections around the world.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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Goff+Rosenthal was last updated: 2008-11-21
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