2 - 20 August 2007
about the exhibition
One of Australia’s most admired artists, GW Bot has described her latest body of work as a “dialogue between silences and spaces and the landscape of glyphs”. The term Australglyphs brings together the idea of ‘austral’ meaning ‘southern’ and ‘glyphs’ meaning ‘signs’. Combined they describe a language of the Australian bush, a metaphorical language which, although derived from the landscape, hints at many different meanings. Like a sequence of visual poems, the series of work maps a spiritual terrain as much as a physical landscape. Gestural marks and rhythmic notations are threaded sparsely through the work, reminiscent of ancient pictographs or hieroglyphics, and describe a winding trail from the known landscape toward a psychological hinterland that lies somewhere between the sensorial and the visual, the abstract and the real. In the distillation of shapes and shadows we see elements of an Australian landscape, and at the same time recognise a more universal, maternal world of memory, death, love, nurture and protection. In all variations of her work, through linocuts, drawings and bronzes, GW Bot marries a mastery of technique with unlimited creativity and intuitive sensitivity. To follow her journey is to be enriched by constant discovery.
A printmaker, painter and sculptor, GW Bot has held over thirty solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Manila. She is represented in over a hundred public art collections including the Albertina (Vienna), British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Fogg Museum of Fine Arts (Harvard), Kharkiv Art Gallery (Ukraine), Lublin Museum (Poland), Museum of Modern Art (Osaka), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of NSW, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (Tas) and Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing).Most recently GW Bot was selected for the Royal Academy 2007 Summer Exhibition in London. This is GW Bot’s first exhibition with Beaver Galleries.
