archives
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
Interiors
On view: 14 July – 20 October 2001
All you need is one big room with kitchens and bathrooms off it, and one big room to sleep, cry and make love in.
Brett Whiteley speaking with journalist Frances Kelly, 1975
Interiors – whether in London, France, New York or Sydney – were important to Brett Whiteley, not only as places in which to live and work, but also as raw material for his imagination. Now, the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills, the artist’s last home and studio before his death in 1992, hosts a new exhibition, Interiors, which shows the influence his physical environment had on his art.
Forty paintings and drawings, as well as sculptures, ceramics and photographs, have been selected by Barry Pearce, head curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Wendy Whiteley, from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Whiteley Estate.
A number of the works were painted at 13 Pembridge Crescent, W11 London, an old Victorian house where Brett Whiteley lived in a flat with his wife Wendy between 1962 and 1963. These works show intimate glimpses of bathrooms with nudes, and include the painting Woman in bath 1964, recently purchased for the Art Gallery of New South Wales by the Art Gallery Society.
Following their return to Sydney in late 1969, the Whiteleys set up house in Lavender Bay, where Whiteley painted such familiar icons as the winner of the 1976 Archibald Prize, Self portrait in the studio 1976. It was also where he painted the haunted portrait of his close friend, Melbourne artist Joel Elenberg who was dying of cancer, titled Portrait of Joel Elenberg 1980.
Images in this exhibition reflect people, things and spaces to which Brett Whiteley felt a particularly close affinity. They are an essential part of the repertoire that defines him as a major Australian artist.
