current exhibition
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 Shades of Whiteley
Iconic Whiteley
On view: 12 September 2009 – 4 April 2010
(Click a thumbnail image for a larger view)
This collection of paintings, sculptures and drawings at the Whiteley Studio represents many facets of Brett Whiteley’s career. Several works are well-known favourites from his early success in Europe and Australia, from his late teens and early twenties, including the Abstraction, Christie and Zoo series, through to his popular Lavender Bay, Paris and Bird series. It provides a unique opportunity to display such rare masterpieces across the artist’s entire career.
The earlier works provide an insight into Whiteley’s emerging talents. In 1959 he entered and won the Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship. Judged by Sir Russell Drysdale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, two of the four works submitted are on display – Sofala and Dixon Street.
His extraordinarily skilled draftsmanship is exemplified in the intimate glimpses of bathrooms with nudes, with Wendy as the model. Woman in bath 4 1963-4 was painted in London and is an example of his first major series concentrating on the nude. Inspired by Pierre Bonnard, Whiteley, then newly married, explored lessons learnt through his early works and abstractions in the embrace of composition, form, movement and energy.
The nude has been predominant really…a very major part of my work. Even when I was painting abstractions, in a way I was painting the nude, but out of focus with no specific definition, and when I broke into figuration…it was the bathroom pictures, it was pictures of my wife in the bath.... Brett Whiteley 1989 (Difficult Pleasure)
The Archibald Prize-winning self portrait of 1976, Self portrait in the studio, is also on display. This key work was painted in the downstairs studio at Whiteley’s home in Lavender Bay, Sydney, in response to Matisse’s Red studio 1911 from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
But there is a dark side to this engaging image. As Wendy Whiteley says:
He was trying silently to say, stay away, this is not what it might seem. Look at this beautiful house and wonderful pictures and things. But there was another side – that’s the duality of life… It was a cage of his interior, his addiction, the window a glimpse of possible escape… escape from one’s own psyche.