Works from the Dry Country

By Andrew Frost

Here’s a fun fact about Guy Warren: he designed the portraits for the original $2, $10 and $20 notes. With their images of farmers, aviators, graziers and poets, the bank notes were about as quintessentially Australian as it was possible to get, knocking around in the pockets, wallets and purses of every man woman and child in the country. It’s not too much of a stretch then to imagine that Warren’s painting has been an attempt to imbue his canvases with the same essential sense of place that his most widely dispersed, though now little known, artistic project achieved.

Warren’s painting has evolved from largely abstract canvases to the more decisive figuration of recent years, and his show at Rex Irwin, Works from the Dry Country, capture in line, figure and pattern the land around Fowler’s Gap. Painting such as Uncertain Journey [2011] and Shadows [2012] with their trace-like lines and figures have the air of cryptic metaphor, whereas works on paper Road Through The Bush [2011] and Season of Silence [2012] are as descriptive and straightforward as their titles. Warren’s latest works have the calm and expectant air of the Australian bush, an immense quiet full of possibility.

Until September 15

Rex Irwin Art Dealer