Melinda Harper, Untitled 2011, oil on canvas, 153 x 182 cm, Courtesy of the artist and NKN Gallery, Melbourne
Exhibition dates: Saturday 27 June – Sunday 25 October 2020
Over the last three decades, Melinda Harper has developed a distinctive and widely admired body of abstract works animated by brilliant colour relationships and dazzling arrangements of geometric shapes. While Harper is best known as a painter, this exhibition will reveal the diversity of her practice through its inclusion of drawings, collages, screenprints, experimental photographs, painted assemblages and exquisite hand stitched embroideries. It also marks the first time in recent years that Heide will present a solo exhibition of an artist whose work is entirely abstract.
Harper’s first exhibition was in 1987 at Pinacotheca gallery in Melbourne and she was a leading member of the Store 5 artists’ group in Melbourne (1989–1993). Initially small in scale and simple in composition—as much due to economical as aesthetic considerations—her paintings have since increased in size and become more complex. Among those included in this survey are pared-back constructivist paintings on wood from the late 1980s, mid-1990s works inspired by the decorative elements of Persian miniature painting, and recent large canvases which provide stunning new geometric and colour variations on her characteristic abstract themes.
Typically in Harper’s works, forms similar in type—blocks, stripes, circles, triangles or variants of these—are amassed in striking compositions of seemingly endless variety, from the harmonious to the cacophonous. Harper builds upon early twentieth-century abstraction and later generations of modernists—her intimate embroideries and her screenprinted fabrics (produced with fellow artist Kerrie Poliness) paying particular homage to modernist women artists. Her investigations of colour and form are also intensely felt, visual responses ‘the act of looking, the obvious, the precise and the precious.’
Heide Museum of Modern Art | 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen VIC 3105
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm Exhibition entry is free with admission to the gallery (Adult $16/Senior $14/Concession $12/Child under 12 FREE) Member FREE