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1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley

Brett Whiteley graphics 1961-92

On view: 9 September 2000 – 21 January 2001

Brett Whiteley, noisy child of 20th-century Australian art and nemesis of critics, was one of this country's most gifted draughtsmen. This talent inevitably spilled over into a substantial body of graphics, many of which will be exhibited at the Brett Whiteley Studio from 9 September 2000 to 21 January 2001.

Whiteley produced over 150 original prints between 1961 and 1992, and used various media of printmaking to express the full range of his subject matter, from figurative abstraction through to landscape, still life, nudes, animals and birds, to the most explicit erotica. Indeed the very breadth of techniques employed by Whiteley, including etching, lithography, woodcut and hand-worked photo-screen, echoed the boundaries that he challenged through his painting and sculpture. 140 works have been selected for this exhibition.

Brett Whiteley graphics 1961–92 showcases some of the finest impressions of Whiteley's most memorable images, from Figures on an ochre background 1961, a silkscreen executed when the artist was receiving extraordinary international focus in London, the powerful heads of his friend Francis Bacon, to the small exquisite linocuts of waves and rivers, and lithographs of nudes of the late 1970s.

'Brancusi in sculpture and Matisse in graphics were the two artists that particularly made one aware of respecting the integrity and truth of each medium whether it be marble, cedar, lithography, charcoal etc; that the pen behaves so differently from the brush, that to draw on copper with a fine nail suits certain subjects, that to draw with a greasy crayon on stone is perfect for others, the nude for example. I am not interested in the Marxist side of printmaking cheaper originals. A good print should have the same feeling of 'rightness' that a one-off drawing should have.' Brett Whiteley, December 1982.