Visiting the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney one day after school, Brett Whiteley was struck by the landscape paintings of his compatriot Lloyd Rees. Many years later, after becoming an artist himself, Whiteley wrote to Rees to tell him how those paintings ‘seemed to have filtered and dredged the whole of Europe through them. They contained nature and ideas, they contained naturalism but seemed also very invented.’ That blend of the observational and the cerebral, full of formal playfulness and technical skill, also characterises Whiteley’s work. In 1995, three years after he died at the age of 53, the Art Gallery of New South Wales opened Whiteley’s studio as a museum and, after a two-year renovation, the building is reopening (from 25 July) with an exhibition of work he made in the 1970s, after a decade spent in Europe and New York. Alongside the landscapes, portraits, interiors and nudes is Alchemy (1972–73), a sweeping 16-metre-wide epic that was arguably Whiteley’s most ambitious attempt to encapsulate his life – and the fullness of life itself – in a single work.
Find out more from the Art Gallery of NSW’s website.
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