Denise Green: Marking Memory

Denise Green Marking Memory 3 – 24th August 2019

Since 2013 I have incorporated photography in my decades’ long art practice. Initially attracted to the medium for its memorial capacity, I combined photography with abstract drawings.

This work took an important turn when I discovered an album of my father’s Second World War service.

Organized with a curatorial eye and indexed, this album documented his experience as a medical corps driver in the North African campaign, experiences he never disclosed. When he returned to Australia after the war he suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, coloring the atmosphere of our family life and my childhood.

Discovering these photos explained my father to me. In creating photo collages from these images, I processed some of the experiences that he never did. Subsequently combining photography and painting, where the photographic image is silkscreened and abstracted, my work continues to deal with war, memory and trauma.

Denise Green

Based in New York since 1969, Melbourne-born artist Denise Green AM explores collage, painting and photography in her practice. After studying in Paris at L’École des Beaux-Arts and La Sorbonne, she moved to New York. There, she studied at Hunter College, under artists Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell.

Her most recent retrospective exhibition was held at the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2016-17.

Over the last two decades, nine museum retrospective exhibitions of her work have toured internationally to institutions which include PS1/MoMA New York, Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), and Museum Kurhaus Kleve (Germany).

Her work is held in major Australian and International collections, including the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and the Albertina Museum (Vienna). In 2020, a museum exhibition of her current photo collages will be presented at H2 Center for Contemporary Art in Augsburg, Germany.

Left; Degrees of Loss Saar (2014) Charcoal and crayon on paper 55.5 x 54 cm $3,300 Right; Degrees of Loss II (2014) Charcoal and crayon on paper 55.5 x 54 cm $3,300

Derailment (2018) Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas 78.7 x 137 cm $12,000

POW Split (2019) Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas 122 x 171 cm $16,000

Lines of Communication (2019) Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas 78.5 x 136.5 cm $12,000

Left; Fields of Subjectivity II (2014) Charcoal and crayon on paper 55.5 x 54 cm $3,300 Right; RJG Air Raid Alexandria (Variant 3) (2018) One photograph and four drawings 46 x 59.5 cm $5,600

Left; RJG Rue Nabi Pacha (Variant 2) (2017) One photograph and three drawings 46.5 x 57.5 cm $5,600 Right; RJG Rue Nabi Pacha (Variant 3) (2017) One photograph and three drawings 45 x 61.5 cm $5,600

RJG Rue Nabi Pacha (Variant 4) (2019) One photograph and three drawings 43.5 x 57 cm $5,600

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