17 August - 20 September 2024
PADDY BEDFORD: GOUACHE | Melbourne
Need to get details about exhibition custom fields via API.
PADDY BEDFORD: GOUACHE will present over 40 gouache works on paper held in Trust since their creation, including several of the last black and white series that Bedford painted at the end of his life.
Far from ancillary to his more extensive paintings on canvas and board, Bedford’s gouache works reveal much about his instinct for form and minimalism, and his joy of painting.
Individually, these works on paper can be appreciated for their poetry. Still, when exhibited en masse, they offer an opus of colour and composition that gives insight into the unique studio practice of this celebrated Gija artist.
Paddy Bedford
Paddy Bedford stands as one of the most influential figures to emerge from the East Kimberley’s late-20th-century artistic renaissance. A senior Gija cultural leader, Bedford carried deep knowledge of Country shaped by a lifetime spent working cattle across the stations of his homelands and participating in ceremonial life. Though he painted bodies and ceremonial objects throughout his youth, his public career as an artist began unexpectedly late, when modest experiments on found timber revealed a strikingly original visual voice. Joining the newly formed Jirrawun Arts collective in the late 1990s, Bedford rapidly became recognised for his spare, elemental compositions. Broad sweeps of ochre bisected by rhythmic lines that chart place, memory and ancestral presence with quiet authority.
Far from abstraction, his paintings map story, law and lived history, often referencing sites marked by conflict as well as spiritual continuity. Today Bedford’s work is held in major national and international collections, celebrated for its restraint, gravitas and profound connection to Gija Country.
There is no provenenace field for artists in AG, shoudl we add a custom field for this? Has it been scoped out sufficeiently
Need to define the interactive map functionality, we can add lat/long values as custom fields TBD.
