Salvatore Zofrea
Watercolours and oils 18 October - 6 November 2016
Au s t r a l i a N Ga l l e r i e s SYDNEY
Au s t r a l i a N Ga l l e r i e s SYDNEY
invites you to the opening
Salvatore Zofrea Watercolours and oils tuesday 18 october 2016 6pm to 8pm 15 roylston street Paddington NsW 2021 to be opened at 6.45pm by Associate Professor Ross Steele AM, Officier de la LÊgion d’Honneur artist talk: Saturday 29 october 2016 2pm Current until sunday 6 November 2016 Open 7 days 10am to 6pm t 02 9360 5177 sydney@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au Front: Flowering gum tree blossoms 2016 watercolour and ink on paper 70 x 76 cm
Devil grevillea 2015 watercolour and ink on paper 57 x 76 cm
Trumpet flowers 2015 watercolour and ink on paper 30 x 55 cm
Ode to the white rose 2 – morning 2016 oil on canvas 30 x 30 cm
The angels, they bake the bread …* the painter salvatore Zofrea has aspired over a long career to
as his Psalms paintings were entering their last phase, Zofrea
conflate a spiritual dimension with the sensuality of material existence.
began to embrace the less structured qualities of the australian
Beginning early in his life with a migration between two hemispheres,
landscape, evidenced especially by the sketchbooks of his preparatory
his incredible story of survival and persistence after a life-threatening
images for the woodcut series Days of Summer shown in 2009,
illness in 1975 is well recorded.
exploding into breathtaking scale with the panoramic polyptych
Born in the south of italy in 1946, he was brought to australia
Morning light, exhibited at australian Galleries in 2014. a quintessential
at the age of nine and began formal art studies in sydney during the
phenomenon of this period was the artist’s growing focus on the
early 1960s. But after visiting europe and Britain during the winter
production of watercolours.
of 1971-72, his near fatal hospitalisation in 1975, and death of his beloved mother the following year, triggered an astonishing trajectory
Watercolour, the most mystical of painting media, brings the two paradigms of Zofrea’s concerns – his subject and his execution
of energy dedicated to three decades exploring one hundred themes
– into perfect alignment. through transparency, light from the paper
related to the biblical Psalms.
penetrates the pigment from behind rather than rebounding externally
Much more was to follow. However especially during the period Zofrea was working through his Psalms series two basic questions hovered over the direction he was taking his vision. the
against impasto, creating a floating luminosity as in a stained glass window. light, colour, space and image are as one, indistinguishable. And so Zofrea transports us through his depictions of flowers,
first concerned an apparent remoteness from the landscape of his
grasses and glimpses of elysium into a more intimate realm of his
adoption. it was always much easier to associate him with the German
repertoire. Chiming with the last movement of Gustav Mahler’s
Max Beckmann, or French customs officer le Douanier Rousseau,
fourth symphony, these watercolours are an unsophisticated child’s
even the eccentric British painter of Christian themes stanley spencer,
view of paradise and earth, separate from each other yet inseparable.
rather than as a potential poet of the australian canon.
All manner of flowers and fruits grow in the benign fields of heaven,
The second question concerned Zofrea’s fierce preoccupation
the dark side of humanity is brushed aside, and angels bake the bread.
with the concrete methodologies of his visual language: woodcut, etching, and above all the process of painting and its lineage traced back through his italian ancestry. such was the fervour of his research,
Barry Pearce, 2016
he always seemed on the cusp of allowing these methodologies to
emeritus Curator of australian art
lead the way; for the material to take dominance over the immaterial,
art Gallery of New south Wales
rather than the other way round. thankfully, the artist kept this threat
* Gustav Mahler, symphony No. 4 in G, iv
in abeyance.
Spring wattle, Kurrajong Hills 2015 watercolour and ink on paper 57 x 76 cm
Spring, Kurrajong Hills 2015 watercolour and ink on paper 56 x 76 cm
Bottlebrush with leafless pea and wax flowers 2016 watercolour and ink on paper 56 x 76 cm
SALVATORE ZOFREA
Dawn on the Hawkesbury River 2015 watercolour and ink on paper 30 x 48 cm
Autumn, Willow Glen Valley, Kurrajong 2016 watercolour and ink on paper 58 x 74 cm
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