Denise Green: Beyond and Between – A Painter’s Journey

First published in 2016 by The University of Queensland Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition: Denise Green: Beyond and Between – A Painter’s Journey UQ Art Museum, Brisbane: 25 November 2016 – 2 April 2017 © 2016 The University of Queensland, the artist and authors All images by Denise Green unless otherwise indicated This publication is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced by any means or process without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to locate the holders of copyright and reproduction rights of all material reproduced in this publication. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any reader with further information.

Views expressed in the publication are not necessarily those of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator:

Helmrich, Michele, author.

Title:

Denise Green : beyond and between - a painter’s journey / Michele Helmrich, Denise Green ; Ingrid Periz, Raphael Rubinstein, Campbell Gray (contributors).

ISBN:

9781742721682 (paperback)

Subjects:

Green, Denise, 1946---Exhibitions University of Queensland Art Museum--Exhibitions Art--21st century--Exhibitions.

Art--20th century--Exhibitions.

Painting, Modern--21st century.

Artists--Australia--Exhibitions.

Artists--United States--Exhibitions.

Other Creators/Contributors: Green, Denise, 1946- author, artist.

Periz, Ingrid.

Rubinstein, Raphael.

Gray, Campbell.

University of Queensland Art Museum, issuing body.

Dewey Number:

759.994

cover: Ardennes Uncovered: Fall 2015 pigment print and drawing on paper Collection of The University of Queensland purchased 2016 Photo: Robert Kastler right: Denise Green, 2016 Photo: Richard Lapham following page: Denise Green’s Long Island City studio, 2016 Photo: Robert Kastler

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Foreword – Campbell Gray.............................................................................................................7 Choice and Circumstance: Tracking Denise Green’s Painting – Raphael Rubinstein...................................................11 Striped Sunlight, Manganese Ground – Ingrid Periz.......................................................... 25 Travelling Beyond and Between – Michele Helmrich......................................................... 37 Selected Curriculum Vitae.............................................................................................................118 Exhibition Checklist.......................................................................................................................... 122 Contributors........................................................................................................................................ 125 Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................ 126

All works of art are from The Denise Green / Francis X. Claps Collection gifted through The University of Queensland in America, Inc. Foundation.

The University of Queensland, 2013, unless otherwise indicated.

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above: Denise Green (centre) and Campbell Gray (left) in Green’s Laight Street Studio, Tribeca, New York, November 2013 Photo: Michele Helmrich following page: Poetry 1972 oil on canvas

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Artist Denise Green AM is a remarkable person. In this publication’s essays, you will read of her departure from Australia at age 17, her early art education in Paris and her arrival in New York in 1969 in the midst of one of the most volatile moments in modern art and social history. You will also read of how Denise participated with highly influential artists and writers on both sides of the debate over abstraction (and even painting itself) and how she absorbed its principles and plotted a path that paid intelligent respect to both sides yet remained firm in her singular course.

More than this and testament to her disciplined approach to life, Denise reserved a few hand-picked works from almost every exhibition she held, which accumulated to form an outstanding collection – a comprehensive document of the issues that pressed upon her mind and of her artistic progress over more than 40 years. Then, at a point in time and in an equally considered manner, Denise worked with her husband Dr Francis X. Claps to divide this collection into three roughly equal and parallel parts, and offered a part to each of three carefully chosen institutions: one in the USA, her home since 1969 and the site of her practice; one in Germany, a place that has understood and promoted her work consistently over the decades; and one to The University of Queensland Art Museum in the city in which she grew up and the country of her fiercely defended nationality.

Not many artists would possess such a degree of foresight or confidence in their ongoing contribution to contemporary art or would stay true to their vision over time.

While the market value of her gift to the UQ Art Museum was greater than any other gift received to that moment, the educational

value of a body of work that methodically charts the course of an artist’s life and practice is priceless in an academic context. The exhibition that this publication celebrates is drawn entirely from the UQ Art Collection and pays tribute to this great generosity, Denise’s remarkable creative life, and the unusual discipline and vision that her gift is based upon. I extend my most sincere gratitude to Denise and Francis for all of these elements and for the rich educational opportunities that they give us in perpetuity. I am both humbled and in awe of their graciousness, expressed in the gift and experienced in their manner whenever I am with them.

I also offer my sincere appreciation to Michele Helmrich, Associate Director (Curatorial), with whom I collaborated in working with Francis and Denise to receive the gift; several additional works by the artist have since entered the Collection through purchase and gift by other generous donors, including the artist herself. I am grateful for Michele’s principled curatorship of this wonderful exhibition and her intelligent and insightful essay in this publication. Both Raphael Rubinstein and Ingrid Periz have also made valuable contributions to this publication and to our understanding of Denise’s work with their carefully researched and sensitively articulated essays.

I am always indebted to the UQ Art Museum staff for their expertise and commitment to producing excellence, and even more so in this project. Every one of them makes significant contributions to each exhibition and publication project, and their openness and generosity are key factors of our success.

Dr Campbell Gray Director 7

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We have as many entangled lines in our lives as in the palm of a hand. But we are complicated in different ways than is a hand.

—Gilles Deleuze1 Every artist develops amid a mixture of givens and electives, a network of influences. Some of these are imposed by the accidents of time, place and family, while others are dependent on the choices that the artist makes (admittedly, these are partly determined by the parameters of time, place and family as well). While no set of factors can guarantee the emergence of compelling art – there will always be those incalculable factors of innate ability and sensibility – some historical alignments contain greater potential than others. As in all aspects of human existence, luck has a significant role to play: being born at a particular time and place; encountering a person who will be instrumental in some radical transformation; the good or ill of living in ‘interesting times’, as the apocryphal Chinese curse has it. The career of Denise Green exemplifies how these diverse sets of influences and inclinations play out. Understanding how these two categories of determining factors (givens and electives) interact with one another in subtle and unpredictable ways clarifies Installation views of New Image Painting (5 December 1978 – 28 January 1979), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Photos: Geoffrey Clements above left: left to right: Joe Zucker Paying Off Old Debts 1976; Neil Jenny Husband and Wife 1970; David True Chinese Sea 1977; Joe Zucker Amphora Series 1971 left: left to right: Denise Green Bridge 1976; The Long House 1977; House 1976; For All and None 1978; The Smallest Difference 1978; Looking Back at the Other 1978; Robert Moskowicz The Swimmer 1977 Images courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

why artists such as Green produce bodies of work that emblematise something fundamental about their moment in history.

Green’s influences are many, and they continue to proliferate as she ceaselessly redefines her work. However, five significant encounters have been crucial in shaping her work: meeting writers and artists associated with New York School of Poetry; studying at Hunter College with Mark Rothko, Ralph Humphrey and Robert Morris; discovering the work of Joseph Beuys; collaborating with the journal Semiotext(e); and independently investigating non-Western culture and thought.

One of the striking things about these encounters, which occurred from around 1970 to 1990, is how they encompass a range of diverse forms: literature, painting, performance art, and philosophy. Green’s openness to all kinds of sources was not common in the 1970s, a time when many aesthetic positions were rife with dogma and prohibitions. However, it may have been precisely such restrictive attitudes that impelled Green to seek out dialogue in non-art realms, such as poetry and radical French thought.

It was soon after her arrival in New York in 1969 that Green met and befriended some of the figures most closely associated with New York School of Poetry, including poets John Ashbery and Kenward Elmslie and artist Joe Brainard. Known for their embrace of experimental modernist forms and an off-hand tone that married high and low culture, the New York School poets were also, as their name suggests, unabashedly inhabitants of New York City, as evidenced most notably in the poems 11

Ralph Humphrey (1932–1990) Number 10, 1973 1973 synthetic polymer paint and canvas on canvas 137.5 x 183.2 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist, by exchange 73.43 Digital image © Whitney Museum, N.Y. Courtesy the Estate of Ralph Humphrey and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

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of Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler.

Apparently most important were Schuyler’s poems, which inspired some of Green’s earliest New York paintings that use a precise, nuanced realist style to depict details of buildings. A poet of dailyness and psychological fragility, Schuyler frequently cast his eyes upward to note the effects of light on the architecture of Manhattan, as in his poem “Freely Espousing” in which he remarks on how ‘Tudor City/ Catches the sky or the glass side/ Of a building lit up at night in fog.’2 Another poem that displays a sensibility in tune with Green’s is “An East Window on Elizabeth Street”, which begins ‘Among the silvery, the dulled sparkling mice lights of tar roofs/ lie rhizomes of wet under an iris/ from a bargain nursery sky: a feeble blue with skim milk blotched/ on the falls. Junky buildings, aligned by a child.’3 Schuyler often gave his poems deceptively plain titles such as “Poem”, and Green makes her debt to Schuyler explicit in titling one of her paintings Poetry (1972). This painting is a study in contrasts. Using the tight cropping that typifies her New York City pictures, Green juxtaposes fragments of a gridded modern office building and a Victorian-era structure on the left half of the painting, while opening the right half to an empty piece of golden-hued sky that evokes the background of some Rococo painting and an atmospheric Colour Field abstraction.

Commenting on her New York City paintings in 1978, Green cited the influence of having studied architecture in Paris.

‘Also’, she added, ‘I wanted somehow to connect my decision to paint with my own experience, and this meant acknowledging a sense of my place. I chose not to paint something purely abstract.’4 Deciding to not paint abstractly could not have been an

easy choice for someone who had studied with Rothko, one of the major figures of Abstract Expressionism. By working in the medium of painting at all, Green was also defying the strictures of one of her other teachers at Hunter, the influential postminimalist Robert Morris, who regularly told his students that if they painted, he would give them a failing grade. It didn’t matter to him whether their work was figurative or abstract: the entire medium of painting was obsolete.

In order to understand the significance of Green’s commitment to painting in the 1970s – a commitment that she has never wavered from over the subsequent decades, as painting’s fortunes have waxed and waned – and the strength required for her breakthrough ‘New Image’ works, it is vital to recognise how widespread the bias against painting was. In her book Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm, Green pens a portrait of Rothko that shows how he was also grappling with the anti-painting sentiments that pervaded the New York art world by the end of his life. She observes how Rothko’s ‘withdrawal and lack of energy may have been related to poor health, but his silence seemed to be an unwillingness to engage with those who opposed painting. Yet the fact of his presence every week in that classroom reinforced my conviction about the validity of painting at a time when it was under attack by the avant-garde.’5 Amid this anti-painting climate, Green became aware of a handful of painters whose work helped her clarify her own direction. Her teacher and mentor Ralph Humphrey, under whom she wrote a thesis on Rothko, influenced her sense of the materiality of painting. She also 13

above: Jennifer Bartlett (1941–) 1 Point Plane to 9 Point Plane 1973 enamel over silkscreen grid on baked enamel steel plates 96.5 x 96.5 cm Image courtesy of Locks Gallery left: Joel Shapiro (1941–) untitled 1973–1974 bronze 12.1 x 13.5 x 8.3 cm © 2016, Joel Shapiro/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York Image courtesy of the artist

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recognised the achievements of painters James Bishop, Joe Zucker and Neil Jenny, as well as Jennifer Bartlett and Susan Rothenberg who, along with Green, would be instrumental in bringing recognisable imagery back into painting by the end of the 1970s. Interestingly, while acknowledging the importance of these painters, Green frequently cites sculptor Joel Shapiro as having a particularly ‘profound influence’ on her work through his small-scale, early 1970s’ sculptures of simple objects, such as boats and houses. It wasn’t just the sculptures themselves that impressed Green, but also Shapiro’s way of speaking about them. ‘It came as a shock’, she has recalled, ‘to hear him say that the “I” was the subject of his work. . . . Some of his comments referred to setting up an archetype instead of subject matter. In the boat shapes, for example, he did not intend to illustrate an object.’6 Presenting an everyday image as an archetype that was imbued with personal significance would become vital to Green as she moved from painting veristic views of New York City to isolated objects. Explicitly representational but not at all veristic, Island and Bridge #1 with Tree (1975) is one work that demonstrates Green’s transition between these two modes of painting. Depicting an overhead view from the artist’s studio of a pedestrian bridge spanning an exit from the Holland Tunnel, the painting uses a simplified, almost schematic, approach: the tree, in particular, with its radically linear style, is closer to a symbolic representation of ‘treeness’ than to any actual tree.

Green’s discovery of Shapiro’s sculptures set the stage for an even more transformative experience: her encounter

with the work of Joseph Beuys. She was particularly impressed when she witnessed his epochal 1974 performance/installation I Like America and America Likes Me during which Beuys spent three days in a cage with a live coyote. She was equally struck by his drawings, so much so that she created a suite of drawings explicitly based on his sculptures. As she told me during a visit to her New York studio, after noting how Beuys employed contour shapes, she thought to herself, ‘I get what he’s doing there. I can do that too.’ The German artist also had another lesson for her: ‘He was allowing more personal content into his drawing.’7 The impact that Beuys had on Green at that crucial juncture in her career has stayed with her. In 2006, she created a body of work that reengaged with him, and also with her New Image paintings of the 1970s. At the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve, Germany, Green presented her ‘Square Column’ series, vertical stacks of paintings each with a centred image. Addressing themes of grief and loss, these unusually formatted multi-panel works were inspired by dual tragedies – the attacks of 9/11, which Green witnessed firsthand from her Manhattan studio, and the bombing of Dresden during World War II. What was radical about New Image Painting in the context of the 1970s, when painting – if it wasn’t dismissed as a historical vestige, a medium superseded by conceptual art, video and performance – was largely confined to a reductive, formalist practice that owed much to the influence of Clement Greenberg, was primarily the introduction of recognisable imagery. Yet, it could be argued that the tendency for boldly centred compositions, 15

which is especially evident in Green’s work, and unfussy paint handling was equally a departure from modernist protocols.

It’s impossible to fully understand Green’s post–New Image work – and, indeed, the entire arc of her development – without taking full account of her engagement with, and subsequent estrangement from, French Theory. In a remarkably candid 2014 article titled “Subjectivity and Artistic Intention”, she describes how, in 1977, she was drawn into the orbit of a group of intellectuals and writers who were committed to importing post-structuralist ideas, most of them originating in Paris, into the US academic and cultural scene.

Through her friendship with Martim Avillez, a Portuguese artist who founded the journal Lusitania, and her affair with Sylvère Lotringer, the editor of Semiotext(e), Green became a part of what is now seen as one of the most important intellectualartistic groups of the time. Having joined the editorial board of Semiotext(e) in 1978, she began to respond in her work to the ideas of the philosophers being

published and discussed in the journal, such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

It’s important to note that Semiotext(e) was not so much an academic journal of ideas as an organ of countercultural revolutionary thought, publishing issues with titles such as ‘Schizo-Culture’ and ‘Polysexuality’ and on the radical, often violent, leftist politics of Germany and Italy.

It embraced everything transgressive, and freely mixed experimental writers such as Kathy Acker and innovative artists such as Christopher Knowles alongside the stars of French Theory. Aware of the vitality of the New York art scene, Lotringer recruited two artists, Green and painter Pat Steir, to help shape the visual aspect of the publication. Among Green’s contributions is a collaboration with filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow on the back cover of the issue on ‘Schizo-Culture’, which developed Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of capitalism as a form of schizophrenia. (This issue, which appeared in 1978, contains Deleuze’s essay “Politics”, which includes an almost lyrical description of different kinds of ‘lines’ – a term Deleuze uses to describe

Denise Green (1946–) #1 Drawing to Beuys 1976 pen and ink on paper 35.5 x 35.5 cm Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist

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the behaviour of individuals and groups – that at times sounds like it might be describing elements in Green’s circa 1980 paintings.)

Green found her involvement with Semiotext(e) stimulating and challenging, but as a painter, she found the intellectual ferment more problematic than energising.

In 1978, Green was included in two important New York museum exhibitions, New Image Painting at the Whitney Museum and Young American Artists at the Guggenheim. In “Subjectivity and Artistic Intention”, she recalls how ‘within a year of these exhibitions the imagery had dropped out of my work.

This change in direction was a direct response to the French theorists and their argument against representation.’8 Rather than merely making some superficial allusions to post-structuralist ideas, as artists will sometimes do in response to the latest wave of fashionable theory, Green undertook the arduous process of remaking her art for the sake of achieving consistency between her intellectual and artistic positions.

It is easy to chart the impact of the Semiotext(e) mentality on Green’s work via several paintings in this exhibition at The University of Queensland. For example, in the Beuys-influenced Disperse #4 (1978), she retains a central image but its edges have begun to dissolve, which is very different from the clear contours seen in works from the previous year, such as Villa Giulia, Woman-Hood and Ghost Vases. More significant, however, are the squiggly white lines that seem to float over the rich, red-earth ground. Echoing Deleuzian notions of multiplicities and flow, these lines set the stage for what

happens in paintings such as Almost All (1979), where Green not only eliminates representational images but also rejects centrality and, in this work and Scans (1979–1980), which are among a series of literally split paintings from the time, even the unity of the support. As the artist explained to me in my recent studio visit, ‘For a year or two, to get away from the New Image habit of centring the paintings, I broke the canvas in two.’9 Before too long, however, Green became cognisant of the impasse she was facing: she was a painter in a milieu where the medium was viewed with utmost suspicion. Green had already encountered and happily defied a militant anti-painting stance when she studied with Robert Morris, but now, because of her deep ties of friendship and intellect, the situation was more complicated.

She realised that Lotringer and Avillez, along with the increasingly influential art historians and critics involved with another journal, October, were, as she recalled, ‘not critically supportive of the discipline of painting, believing it to be less relevant to culture than film, photography and installation art’.10 Green persevered with her embattled medium but, by eliminating the image, she lost touch with the deepest origins of her work: ‘The figurative elements in my work were the primary way that I had conveyed emotional states of mind. The most destructive outcome of my involvement with Semiotext(e) was that for several years the subjective dimension of my work tapered off.’11 If I dwell at length on Green’s immersion in, and rejection of, the post-structuralist discourse associated with Semiotext(e) – an episode that was, after all, relatively 17

‘Schizo-Culture’ issue of Semiotext(e) 3, no. 2, 1978.

Back cover design by Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green Reproduced courtesy of Semiotext(e).

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short-lived when seen in the context of her entire career – it is not only because I believe it to have been a pivotal moment for her, but also because of the importance that theory would come to have for many abstract painters in the 1980s and 1990s.

As with her embrace of recognisable imagery, Green was ahead of her time in her efforts to incorporate radical French thought into the practice of painting.

From the mid-1980s on, the influence of French philosophers (Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard) on a slightly younger cohort of painters such as Peter Halley and Lydia Dona was crucial; subsequently, postmodernist theory came to pervade much of contemporary art until at least the end of the twentieth century.

Green confronted the challenge of theory and left it behind years before it became the lingua franca of the US art world.

Perhaps because of her time in Paris (culminating in the heady days of May ’68, which she experienced first-hand), perhaps because of her intellectual curiosity, perhaps because of chance encounters in the idea-rich milieu of downtown 1970s’ Manhattan, Green found herself in the front line of an incredibly significant cultural shift. In terms of her art and career, she paid a price in the short term for her immersion in theory, but ultimately the experience made her a stronger artist, clarifying what she really wanted to do as a painter.

By the mid-1980s, Green had worked through her ‘theory crisis’ and welcomed centrality back into her paintings, yet she preferred, at least for the moment, not to return to recognisable imagery. Geometric shapes, mostly squares and rectangles nested inside one another, constituted

her recurring vocabulary, along with those Deleuzian floaters that remained as a means to bring drawing into her canvases and as a way to activate the entire painting.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when identifiable objects reappear, when Green’s geometry shifts into an image that we can put a name to. In some cases, it’s only by working backwards that an image reveals itself. For instance, when looking at the fan motif in September Morn (2003), one realises that this is the same shape that began appearing around 1990 without immediately announcing itself as a fan.

In the early 1990s, Green made one of the more dramatic changes in her work by eliminating colour entirely and relying on only black, white, and intermediate tones of gray. Perhaps more significantly, this was the moment when the emotional content and subjectivity that had been so important to her mid-1970s’ work returned to her paintings. Ceasing her longstanding practice of using oil stick to make linear marks, Green began to use a brush to draw with oil paint onto canvases covered with a medium that dissolved her lines as she created them. Giving a new dynamic energy to her paintings, this technique can be seen in paintings such as Scallywag (1992) and a series of 1993–1994 paintings in which the canvases are abruptly divided into dark and light halves. The deeper content of these starkly black-and-white works wasn’t immediately evident to the artist. As she recounts in Metonymy in Contemporary Art, ‘Only in retrospect did it occur to me that the change had been stimulated by feelings of grief for my father, who had died in Australia in 1969. . . . As the work began to change dramatically, thoughts of my father entered my conscious mind.’12 19

Ground Zero 2001 synthetic polymer paint on canvas

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Since then, Green’s work, through its various iterations of form, content and technique, has continued to explore, ever more profoundly, the potential of painting to embody and convey subjectivity and feelings. But for Green, ‘subjectivity’ in painting does not preclude an engagement with the larger world, as we can see in her numerous works dealing with the trauma of world history. These works include paintings such as Ground Zero (2001) and her recent painting-photography experiments that delve into the history of World War II. As Green reconnected with the emotional aspect of her work, she started increasingly to gravitate towards non-Western influences, in particular Australian Aboriginal culture and the ideas of Indian poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan (1929– 1993), in whose writings she found the concept of metonymy that has been crucial to her art ever since. Ramanujan’s thought is especially evident in Green’s ‘Rose’ paintings. In part intended as an elegy to the artist’s garden-loving mother, the ‘Rose’ paintings draw their repeating motif from a structure that Ramanujan noted in South Indian Medieval poetry, which Green brilliantly folds into a Gertrude Stein reference. This multivalent, multilayered method epitomises Green’s quest for a ‘metonymic’ art: ‘When an artist creates metonymically, the artwork is a seamless extension of their state of mind . . . . These works [Green’s early 1990s black-andwhite paintings] that emerged from feelings of loss and absence do not symbolically depict emotions, rather they directly portray them.’13 As an alternative to both formalism and expressionism – those binary categories that have structured so much thinking about Western art – Green

proposes a much more holistic vision of art. She weaves her many influences and encounters, her particular strands of ‘givens’ and ‘electives’, into an oeuvre that seamlessly extends the artist’s mind into the minds of us, her viewers.

1. Gilles Deleuze, “Politics,” Semiotext(e) themed issue ‘Schizo-Culture’ 3, no. 2 (1978): 156.

This text, in a different translation, also appears under the title “On the Line,” in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 225–234.

2. James Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993), 3. In recent years, the interactions of visual artists and New York School poets have received a fair amount of scholarly attention; Green’s involvement with them has yet to be adequately studied, perhaps because it only lasted for a few years at the start of her career.

3. Ibid., 84.

4. Denise Green, artist’s statement in New Image Painting (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), n.p.

5. Denise Green, Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm (South Yarra, Vic.; Minneapolis, MN: Macmillan Art Publishing; University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 51.

6. Ibid., 55.

7. Denise Green, conversation with the author, New York, 1 August 2016.

8. Denise Green, “Subjectivity and Artistic Intention,” Asian Art News, January/February 2014: 64.

9. Green, conversation with the author, 1 August 2016.

10. Denise Green, An Artist’s Odyssey (South Yarra, Vic.; Minneapolis, MN: Macmillan Art Publishing; University of Minnesota Press), 99.

11. Green, “Subjectivity and Artistic Intention,” 64.

12. Green, Metonymy in Contemporary Art, 95.

13. Green, “Subjectivity and Artistic Intention,” 65–66.

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The Old Montauk Highway 1982 oil and paint stick on canvas

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above: Ardennes Uncovered: Fall 2015 pigment print and drawing on paper Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016 Photo: Robert Kastler far right: Guldibja Bara Also known as Gulpitja Bara, the north-west wind 1948 natural pigments on bark 58 x 38 cm (irreg.)

Gift of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1956 Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery Reproduced courtesy Š the artist licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency, 2016

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In 1977, Denise Green visited the Ku-ringgai Chase National Park north of Sydney at the invitation of Daniel Thomas, whose practice it was, while chief curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and later as head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, to organise what he called his ‘Ku-ring-gai drives to Aboriginal art and nature’ for visiting overseas artists and curators. Thomas remembers taking Gilbert & George, Nam June Paik, Henry Geldzahler, William Wegman, and Keith Sonnier, among others, there.1 For Green, who had left Australia in 1965 and settled in New York four years later, the Ku-ring-gai excursion was to prove fundamental in several ways.

For one, the experience helped her formulate an argument about the nature of artistic, and specifically painterly, expression against what she perceived to be a growing critical hostility towards the medium. This argument, developed in a series of articles and talks over several decades, culminated in her 2005 book Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm.2 Within Green’s own practice, the Ku-ring-gai experience underwrites her fairly recent adoption of photography – on display in this exhibition in the two Ardennes Uncovered... works (2015) and King Island (and Subjectivity) (2014) reproduced in vinyl on the UQ Art Museum building’s external glass façade – where the medium functions as a particular marker of place. Ku-ring-gai thus features as a prompt to a period of self-theorising and as the ground, we might say, of the painter’s photographic turn.

grooves in rock. She recalls noticing at the time ‘Something is happening here that’s not happening in contemporary Western art. I’m not seeing this in New York.’3 Green subsequently linked the Ku-ring-gai visit to seeing Indigenous art from Groote Eylandt at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, an experience she has come to recognise as important for her own work. Writing about the Groote Eylandt bark paintings many years later, she remembered ‘the directness of the drawing . . . the simplicity was powerful and charged with conviction’.4 Her initial response to the work, at least in this retelling, was formally oriented. Any further understanding of the meaning of Indigenous art, its significance within its own terms of reference, came later when, in the second half of the 1980s, her own interest in French Theory shifted in favour of exploring non-Western aesthetics.

At Ku-ring-gai, Green saw ochre-stencilled handprints, rock engravings, and rock paintings produced by the Guringai people, the traditional owners of the land, whose long presence there registered in other ways, such as middens and axe-grinding 25

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Island and Bridge #1 with Tree 1975 synthetic polymer paint on canvas

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In a 1998 Artist’s Choice essay for Art & Australia, Green used the opportunity to write about the Groote Eylandt paintings, which she had revisited many times over the years, to advance a theory of signification and expression. She distinguished Western artists’ use of symbolism from what she termed Aboriginal artists’ ‘metonymic way of thinking’, adding: If I introduce this linguistic term it is because the word has become an integral part of a conceptual framework I evolved in trying to understand Aboriginal ways of working and the maturing of my own creative process. . . . Metonymic thinking for me implies the fusion of an inner spiritual and an outer material world. When an artist creates metonymically the artwork is seamless, as in the bark work of Groote Eylandt.5 This seamlessness, or ‘fusion’, results from a conception of self that is linked to a shared cosmology – ‘mythical and mystical realms that are collectively shared much more than those of most western artists’6 – and a mark-making system similarly collectively understood. Painting, in this society, can ‘externalize spirituality’.7 In Green’s account, because Western artists lack ‘a collective sign language, this fusion can only be expressed intuitively through a metonymic use of the medium’ but this, at least in her case, does not imply any expressionism; rather, it implies a use of paint that ‘is seamless with a state of mind. This means that different ways of handling paint allow a western artist’s subjectivity to fuse with the work . . .’.8 Metonymy further developed Green’s model of painting as a fusion of inner states and outer form, drawing on the work of Indian 28

philosopher and poet A. K. Ramanujan and buttressing her argument with examples from India, China, and a range of contemporary artists, including Alex Katz, Frank Stella, Barry Le Va, Dorothea Rockburne, and Joseph Beuys. In a metonymic view of man in nature, ‘. . . man is continuous with the context in which he finds himself . . . nature and culture are not opposed to each other . . . they are parts of the same continuum’.9 Aboriginal art is exemplary for its integration of ‘the abstract dimension of a painting’ with ‘an inner reality’.10 Metonymy is in part then a claim about Indigenous art but it is also a claim about other forms of art, including her own. It is about Green wanting to reclaim both subjectivity and its registration via paint – ‘the inner world of the artist . . . [that] can be metonymically conveyed in a painting’.11 In Western art, this ‘metonymic’ conveyance is achieved through touch.

In 1978, Green was included in the New Image Painting exhibition at the Whitney Museum, where her works’ reduced forms placed against monochromatic but painterly backgrounds displayed the kind of ambiguous meaning that curator Richard Marshall located in the fluctuation between figuration and abstraction. Green had developed a repertoire of shapes – the house, the chair, and the sled among them – that functioned less as representations of objects in space than as something like symbols, symbols with diffuse rather than precise meanings. Along with the work of other artists associated with the 1978 exhibition, among them Neil Jenney, Jennifer Bartlett and Susan Rothenberg, Green’s work was engaged with a kind of painterly communication not analysable through semiotics and not obedient to an expressionist ethos.

The works in the Whitney exhibition showed Green moving from an early heightened realism depicting her New York neighbourhood, as in Mercer Street (1972) and Ericsson Place (1975), to an increasing simplification, exemplified in the UQ Art Museum exhibition by Island and Bridge #1 with Tree (1975). At the same time, she was concerned with marking out the image from the ground, squaring off an inner area on which a figure or object was placed. Green sometimes marked up these areas with the lineaments of a grid or cross hatching. Green thinks of the ink drawings in which tiny objects appear isolated on marked up ground – several of which are displayed in the current exhibition – as key to all her subsequent painting, where she aims for the essential idea of the depicted object rather than its painted description. These early drawings too were a means of investigating the resonance of different shapes – lozenges and rectangles, curves and zigzags – that contributed to the vocabulary of her later paintings. The amphora, a female-shaped vessel of Neolithic origins, makes its first appearance in Villa Giulia (1977). White lines running from points on the ochre background stretch a space against which the vessels appear to rest or float.

Woman-Hood, also from 1977, shows how her simplified images are less descriptors of objects than encapsulations of some archetypal resonance. Green achieves much with little; the force of her reduction in 1977 is more resonant now in the year of French burkini bans.

In Disperse #4 (1978), Green modifies the format she used in the New Image Painting work by corralling a central square and overlaying it with calligraphic elements that read like writing-coming-into-sense.

They recall the appearance of Arabic script to non-Arabic readers who recognise that it is meaningful but lack the capacity to grasp it. For a decade or more, Green pursued these often uncharacterisable marks disposed on ground, exploiting what she has called ‘the pure act of making surface’.12 What results is often a play between painterly and calligraphic marks and, as in the lower left of Almost All (1979), a productive ambiguity of surface.

Masking and striping are also evident in subsequent work along with what might be called signature shapes, as in Blue Quadrant (1984). Morphing later into a wipe or fan – see After Lightnin’ Hopkins (2009–2011) – the quadrant is used here to apportion and hold the surface while resisting any fixity in terms of depth. In works on paper from 1996 onwards, Green lays out, indeed itemises, her repertoire of shapes. Layering also comes into effect, along with a sense of positive and negative image, so that it is difficult, as in #19 Credo (1999), to establish where the picture plane or the surface of the work lies.

(Her work with photographs revisits this treatment.)

The 9/11 attacks on New York City, which Greene witnessed from her downtown studio, first register in this current exhibition in Ground Zero (2001), where she returns to an early group of works depicting the World Trade Center. The vertical steel columns of the perimeter walls, a scrim of anamorphic pale bands masking the building’s façade in her 1972 watercolour World Trade Center Plaza (1972), are recalled as a central striped band; the 2001 work’s floating vessels read as cinerary urns.13 Marks on and in the surface of the ‘Brisbane’ series from a year later read less as banded stripes 29

Villa Giulia 1977 oil on canvas

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than striations, running downward, like scars or tears. The emotional load they carry is palpably different from the stripes of other works such as the post-9/11 Chrome Yellow (2003), with its bombsite yellow haze, and Kleve (Katsura) (2003), which variously suggest remnants or traces, negative impressions. Like objects in a pictogram, they register absence instead of presence.

Green has produced other work prompted by traumatic events. The ‘Rose’ series (c.

2005–2008) followed her mother’s death, while the striking black-and-white work of the mid-1990s arose from a delayed mourning for her father. In 2014, she used photography for the first time, working with images of the Saar River loop in an eponymously titled series to recall a recently deceased acquaintance long associated with the area.

In these works, photographs are flanked by identically sized drawings featuring shaded areas of closely worked curlicues and occasionally the fan-like or ‘wipe’ shape she has been using for several decades. Although the Saar region was heavily bombed during World War II, its wartime history was incidental to Green’s choice. The ‘Ardennes’ series, all of which incorporate photographs of the Ardennes forest, is different, having being chosen precisely because of its battleground history, which is now almost invisible. Green modifies these photographs, over- or underlaying vertical strips of abstract drawing and disrupting the photographs’ planarity and illusion in an intervention that is both formal and representational. She has used this procedure for all subsequent photographically based series. The strips of drawn marks, the result of an entirely separate, studio-bound process, momentarily interrupt the scene. This alternation, like the vertical stripes across much of Green’s work, recalls the striped sunlight of screened areas

in Queensland houses and particularly the area underneath them, which was where Green first drew as an adolescent.14 In a work such as Ardennes Uncovered: Fall (2015), the historical meaning of the photograph is given only by the caption and a degree of spectatorial knowledge – the area being the site of the bloody Battle of the Bulge at the close of World War II – but this meaning is nowhere apparent in the photograph itself nor in the work of which it is a part. In this way, Green’s use of photography begins to approximate contemporary photography’s ongoing engagement with what Kitty Hauser has called ‘the conceit of a landscape haunted by history’.15 According to Hauser, this is the result of the contemporary ‘obsession’ with memory that is given fullest form in photography, ‘which highlights the gap between the present appearance of a site and the events that took place there’.16 With the exception of the ‘Ardennes’ series, however, Green chooses sites because of personal rather than historical associations.

King Island, for example, was the site of Green’s family visits off Wellington Point.

Any site’s historical resonance is left to the vagaries of individual reception and, to this extent, historical knowledge becomes a form of private meaning. If Green’s turn to photography does not mine that ‘gap’ noted

by Hauser, her use of it nevertheless shares with that work a sense of landscape as a bearer of immanent meaning.

When I re-discovered the rock engravings at Ku-ring-gai, I knew that I had absorbed something from Aboriginal art. I only figured out what that something was beginning in 1987 after my residencies in India.17

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Green has spoken of her visit to Ku-ringgai as a re-discovery, a re-acquaintance with the already known, if yet imperfectly understood – the Groote Eylandt barks. It would take a doubled distancing – from New York, from Australia – before she could begin her attempt to understand what she had seen in Ku-ring-gai and in Queensland. The year of her visit, 1977, was also the year that Pictures, an exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp, opened in New York’s Artists Space. Pictures signalled the ascendance of photographically based work, crystallising what Robert Pincus-Witten has characterised as the mid-1970s’ ‘belittling of the hand’s achievements in favour of the camera’s’; in other words, the hostility to painting.18 In Ku-ring-gai, Green saw the possibility of painting, of human markmaking, accessing a profound depth of meaning. This possibility was increasingly foreclosed in the advanced critical circles she frequented in New York.19 Over time, Green came to understand that the meaning of Indigenous art is based upon the reciprocal relation between artist and place. Non-Indigenous artists, lacking both the shared cosmology and collectively understood repertoire of marks underwriting Indigenous practice, could nevertheless aspire to a similar complexity of meaning, fusing what she has called ‘inner states’ and abstracted, outer form.

Does this understanding, produced via an encounter with Indigenous art north of Sydney and repeated museum viewings of Indigenous art in Brisbane, make Green an Australian artist? Or does her Australianness rest in the vestiges of striped sunlight that recur in her paintings and are worked through collage style in her most recent work? Does Australia register as a habit of 32

mind or an effect of place? (Metonymic thinking would refuse these dualisms.) It can be said that Green, who has spent most of her life working as an artist outside the country, is of Australia without being in it.20 In Metonymy, she writes ‘Artistic identity is formed as much by what you admire as what you reject.’21 Her engagement with Indigenous art, a direct result of that visit to Ku-ring-gai almost 40 years ago, is one marker of this admiration, one component of her artistic identity, however categorised.

And that visit shows its continuing effect in her most recent work where photographed landscapes – of Australia and elsewhere – are disrupted through excision and striated juxtaposition, and treated like another surface or ground for marking.

1.

Daniel Thomas, email correspondence with the author, 12 December 2015. Katrina Rumley, at that time a Senior Project Officer with the Visual Arts Board, also accompanied Thomas and Green on that 1977 visit.

2.

Denise Green, Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm (South Yarra, Vic.; Minneapolis, MN: Macmillan; University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

3.

Denise Green, conversation with the author, 11 December 2015.

4.

Denise Green, An Artist’s Odyssey (South Yarra, Vic.; Minneapolis, MN: Macmillan; University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 68. At the time of writing, it has not been possible to identify the Groote Eylandt works that Green recalls seeing in the Queensland Museum in her youth. Although the Museum did purchase ‘six bark paintings in the 1940’s’ (correspondence with Meg Lloyd, Queensland Museum Librarian, 16 August 2016), its display of Indigenous material ‘stood unchanged from 1911–1986’. Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby, eds., “Introduction,” in The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 4.

From 1930 to 1973, the Museum’s Exhibition building was also home to the Queensland Art Gallery, then called the Queensland National Art Gallery. In 1956, the Gallery received a gift of Indigenous work from the AmericanAustralian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (AASEAL). Margo Neale notes that the AASEAL gift, which contained 12 Groote Eylandt bark paintings, was not formally accessioned by the Gallery until 1991. See Neale, “Charles Mountford and the ‘Bastard Barks’: A Gift from the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, 1948: Mountford Expedition Works,” in Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850–1965 (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1998), 210–17.

Despite this, at least some of the AASEAL gift was placed on display. Lisa Chandler writes that the AASEAL works at the Queensland Gallery ‘were used extensively for display on a rotational basis from the 1950’s onwards’.

Chandler, “Making a Mark: The Collection and Display of Aboriginal and Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery” (doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, 2006), 40.

Chandler also cites Karel Kupka’s remark, made shortly after the Gallery received the AASEAL gift, commending the Gallery on its ‘three barks, well exposed’ in “Australian Aboriginal Bark Painting”, Oceania 27 (1956–1957): 267. It seems possible that the work Green recalls seeing in the Queensland Museum was in fact in the Queensland Art Gallery and likely came from AASEAL. Writing about the Groote Eylandt works she saw, Green recalls being ‘drawn to their black backgrounds...’. Denise Green, “Map of Groote Eylandt,” Art & Australia 35, no. 2 (1998): 200. Groote Eylandt paintings on bark, particularly those from the period in which Mountford was collecting, are distinguished by dense black backgrounds, generally the result of the local ‘abundance of manganese oxide.’

Neale, “Charles Mountford and the ‘Bastard Barks’,” 213.

12. Denise Green, conversation with the author, 15 December 2007.

13. This watercolour, now in the Kerry Stokes Collection, is reproduced in Denise Green: Verwandtschaften mit Joseph Beuys: Vor und nach dem 11 September: Eine Retrospective [Affinities with Joseph Beuys: Before and after September 11: A Retrospective] (Saarbrücken: Saarland Museum, 2003), 29.

14. Green discusses this space in An Artist’s Odyssey (67–68), where it immediately precedes her account of seeing the Groote Eylandt works in the Queensland Museum.

15. Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape 1925–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 58.

16. Ibid., 94.

17. Green, conversation with the author, 11 December 2015.

18. Robert Pincus-Witten, “Receding Horizons: Fading Notes on the Seventies,” in High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975, ed. Katy Siegel (New York: Independent Curators International/D.A.P., 2006), 143.

19. Green discusses these circles in Metonymy, 60–62.

20. See my “Afterword: Changing Places,” in Denise Green, An Artist’s Odyssey, 192–196 for further considerations of Green as an Australian artist. Green was included in the Whitney Museum’s New Image Painting exhibition at a time when the Museum did not show non-American artists. Included in the Guggenheim Museum’s Young American Artists exhibition a year later, Green was one of several artists not American-born.

21. Green, Metonymy, 50.

5. Green, “Map of Groote Eylandt,” 200.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Green, Metonymy, 9.

10. Ibid., 12.

11. Ibid., 25.

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Blue Quadrant 1984 paint stick, oil crayon, and charcoal on canvas

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Ericsson Place 1975 oil on canvas Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 1977

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For these are the houses in which we are going to recapture the intimacy of the past in our daydreams.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space1 … what is contained mirrors the container.

—A. K. Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?”2 In 1977, the University Art Museum (UAM; now known as the UQ Art Museum) purchased a small work by Denise Green entitled Ericsson Place through Brisbane’s Ray Hughes Gallery. Painted in 1975, it depicts a view of architectural façades close to Green’s Laight Street studio in Tribeca, New York.3 In 1980, the UAM purchased through Gallery A in Sydney a second work

by Green, entitled Can Never Really Come Together (1979), an oil stick drawing on a graph-marked Mylar sheet.4 In a period of four years, the representational image had been replaced by abstract mark-making and signs, including an arrow. The two works were relatively modest yet significant purchases of the work of this Melbourneborn artist. Similar small square canvases of Laight Street and Ericsson Place painted in 1974 were acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art in Sydney (now Museum of Contemporary Art Australia), respectively, in 1975.5 Green’s initial success in New York came in 1975 when she was offered a solo exhibition of new paintings at the Art Resources Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.6 Support quickly followed in her home country when Bernice Murphy curated Project 32: Denise Green at AGNSW in 1980, the artist already beginning a career-long practice of exhibiting in both the US and Australia.7 In 1977, she exhibited 20 Recent Drawings at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, and

subsequently at the School of Art Gallery, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne. By the time of her 1980 Project 32 exhibition, she had held solo exhibitions in North America, Belgium and Australia; could boast two significant group exhibitions of 1978 in New York, New Image Painting at the Whitney and Young American Artists: 1978 Exxon National Exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and was represented by Max Protetch Gallery in New York.

In 1963, aged 17, Green left her home in Brisbane for New Zealand. She later travelled to London in 1965 and Paris in early 1966, where she studied at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts.

She moved to New York City in 1969, and has continued to live there ever since. A decision to pursue graduate studies in New York subsequently proved strategic in that it opened up exhibition opportunities in that city. At Hunter College, she worked with artists Mark Rothko (later writing a thesis on his work), Robert Motherwell, Ralph Humphrey, Tony Smith and Robert Morris. In reflecting on her development as an artist, she has spoken of her desire to be a painter and her resistance to the anti-painting stance of Robert Morris, who was part of a generation exploring conceptually based practices, including performance art and earth art. At the time, she was a younger artist who stood apart from both the older generation of American abstract painters and those artists who had been pursuing minimalist and conceptually based practices since the mid-1960s.8 Rothko, however, remained important for Green, as she stated in 1985: ‘He had been my teacher when I first studied at Hunter. He died in 1970 and he only taught for one semester, and I was lucky enough to be there, and to study with him.’9 Throughout Green’s career, her work has remained anchored in abstraction.

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Today, researchers visiting the UQ Art Museum can examine Ericsson Place and Can Never Really Come Together alongside 29 other drawings and paintings made by Green between 1972 and 1979, including late 1970s paintings with features similar to those she exhibited in the Whitney’s New Image Painting (hereafter referred to as her New Image paintings). In 2013, the artist worked with her husband Dr Francis X. Claps to give The University of Queensland 80 works on paper and 36 paintings by Green, made between 1972 and 2010.

Other individuals have also donated works, while the University has acquired several works produced over the past decade, including some of Green’s recent photocollages. Denise Green: Beyond and Between – A Painter’s Journey comprises a selection of 102 works made between 1972 and 2015, all drawn from UQ’s holdings, with an additional work, based on a photo-collage, reproduced in vinyl on the exterior glass façade of the Art Museum.

Such a large group of works allows a nuanced view of the way that Green’s artmaking has developed over time.

Catalogues have accompanied Green’s exhibitions, now copious in number, and the artist has also written on her work, including the books Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm (2005) and Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey (2012), the latter including additional authors.10 The published writings, particularly Green’s autobiographical passages in An Artist’s Odyssey, articulate the influences on her life in both Australia and North America, and important periods of time spent travelling. We learn, for instance, of Green’s experience making posters during the Paris resistance of 1968; her association with the New York Poets through her marriage to poet Bruce Wolmer shortly after arriving in New York 38

until they separated in the mid-1970s; her joining of the editorial group of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics in New York in 1976–1977; and her involvement (along with filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow and painter Pat Steir) with Semiotext(e) journal, produced by philosopher Sylvère Lotringer and featuring the writings of major French theorists, in 1978. Seminal encounters are also revealed, such as Green witnessing Joseph Beuys’s legendary performance with a live coyote, I Like America and America Likes Me at the René Block Gallery, New York, in 1974. Such an association with radical student politics, feminist discourse, French critical theory and important contemporary art provided fulcrums of experience that interacted with her development as an artist.

The Embedded Universe Viewers new to Green’s oeuvre may remark on the apparent shifts and turns of her practice – the move between midtwentieth-century abstraction and the figurative, explorations beyond Western philosophy and culture to those associated with Asia’s and Australia’s Indigenous peoples – and her writings that assert an emotional register or narrative to the making of artworks and their referents. Her association with the feminist concerns of Heresies appear to have been short-lived, other than that she vigorously pursued a career as a female artist in North America, Europe and Australia over four decades, and during this time engaged with abstraction – without overtly recasting it in terms of the feminine – that had largely been the domain of male artists.

Yet, almost in contradiction, representation has played an equally important part in her practice, most notably in her early paintings of Manhattan building façades and in her

most recent photo-collages incorporating photographs of the landscape, but also in recurring imagery akin to the ideogram/ pictogram. Emotions tied to place and family have perhaps pervaded the various strands of her practice, though again, the empathetic viewer needs seek out that emotional register; emotion is restrained, disciplined even.

Green’s New Image paintings of the late 1970s were characterised by her paredback monochromes with a reductive motif centrally placed in the square canvas, often with an internal square border articulating this field. The isolated motifs appear like ideograms or pictograms; yet, deprived of context, they defy easy interpretation.

Space, which had often played an important part in her paintings of Tribeca architectural façades, now became all encompassing.

As Green has said, such isolating space ‘played a crucial role in helping to elevate the image into an archetype’.11 In works such as Woman-Hood (1977), a mixture of oil and wax has been dispersed across the canvas by using a palette knife. The central image resembles a comb or veil, the title and monochromatic pink a reminder that the work was painted when Green was involved with the feminist magazine Heresies. While Green has linked such centrally placed motifs to the work of an artist friend Joel Shapiro, it is perhaps also reminiscent of earlier works by Jasper Johns, in which somewhat banal objects (such as a coat hanger) were immersed within a monochromatic field, often using encaustic on canvas. Johns’s square Green Target (1955) in the Museum of Modern Art is an instance of his ‘burying familiar mundane images within flat, often monochrome abstractions’.12 What Green sensed in Shapiro’s work, however, was a metonymic investment of the artist’s inner life, a concept that will be discussed shortly.

The painting Villa Giulia (1977), which features abstracted vessel shapes, was made after Green visited Rome the same year. At the Villa Giulia in Rome and the necropolis and archaeological museum in Tarquinia, she saw Etruscan amphorae (storage jars) and other vessels. The vessel shape returns in the latter part of the 1990s in works such as Forest Hills (1999), Azzurro Di Cobalto Puro (1998), and Stake-out (2001), as well as those made at the time of the 9/11 disaster, such as Ground Zero (2001). While the somewhat figurative shape of the amphorae has been noted by Green and other authors, the black- and red-figure painting is also relevant to her New Image paintings due to the flat simplified forms, reductive colour, and lack of visual context within the images decorating these ancient vessels. Furthermore, in the late 1970s, ancient Egyptian art was firmly in the public sphere, with the hugely popular Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition touring Australia and the US in 1976–1979, with venues including Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.13 Egyptian hieroglyphic ideograms offer parallels to Green’s isolated figurative elements, presenting an even more arrested and stylised figurative language.

Green’s imagery in these late 1970s’ works is not open to ready interpretation, her motifs remaining as intriguing remnants of reality, devoid of context within the square format and the minimalist aesthetic of the monochrome. While a number of the motifs from Green’s New Image paintings did return in later years, such as the chair and the bridge, the vessel retained a particular value.

Not only does Green see the amphorae as ‘carriers of history’,14 but also as early as 1978 she described her work as ‘vessels which carry emotions and ideas’.15 During 1979, the centralised image in Green’s work disappeared, which she 39

Woman-Hood 1977 oil and wax on canvas

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acknowledges was due to the influence of her involvement with the theorists surrounding Semiotext(e) and their critique of representation. A different kind of reductive and dispersed visual language began to enter her work, one that included references to the grid and recognisable signs, including punctuation marks.

Drawings on clear or graph-marked Mylar sheets and contour paper introduced a transparency to the work. The dispersed images included marks made with oil stick on both sides of the paper, with those on the reverse side changing in colour and intensity. In the paintings Almost All (1979) and Scans (1979–1980), the picture plane is further disrupted by the canvas being split in two, the shaped canvases becoming diptychs.

By the mid-1980s, however, Green had moved away from the Semiotext(e) theorists, and a centralised focus – including an inner square – returned in paintings such as Blue Quadrant (1984), Une Aventure Méthodique (1986) and Duane Triangle (1988). At its centre, Blue Quadrant features a clearly delineated shape, the quadrant, akin to the fan shapes that would recur in a number of subsequent works. This blue shape, edged in red, is placed against raw (primed) canvas and encircled with freely drawn charcoal and coloured lines; this internal square is then bordered in opposing corners by areas vigorously worked in oil stick, two in white and two in black. The sweeping calligraphic lines play against the crisp geometry of the work, providing a sense of both energy and equilibrium.

During the 1980s, Green travelled extensively throughout Europe, India and South-East Asia. In 1986, Green undertook a residency in Ahmedabad, India, and worked at the Gandhi Ashram Paper Mill.

Here, her capacity to disrupt or reinvent

the picture plane and the drawn image appeared in works of handmade paper she produced, such as Blue Mayur 7, Aaroh Avroh #3, and Grey Parrot #9, where the drawn imagery is literally embedded in the paper, either as dyed marks or wire. The process itself necessitated an improvisational approach, including making allowances for unexpected outcomes.

It was here that Green also began to engage with the writings of linguist A. K. Ramanujan and psychoanalyst Alan Roland, particularly Ramanujan’s essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” and Roland’s book In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross Cultural Psychology (1989).16 From this, she developed her understanding of the linguistic concept of metonymy,17 with her subsequent writings describing how emotion and subjectivity were integral to her practice. Ramanujan, in separating metonymy from metaphor and symbolism, said that ‘to describe the exterior landscape is also to inscribe the interior landscape’.18 Green adopts this understanding when she describes how those Indian artists who carved sacred sculptures ‘proceed by accessing spiritual states of mind in which there is no separation between the creator and the created object’, whereas ‘Western artists use symbolic thinking and maintain the separation between self and object.’19 Similarly, writing of Indian spectators viewing the Kathakali dancers in Cochin, she said, ‘the dancers do not portray the characters instead they become the characters’.20 This links to Green’s argument that an artist’s subjectivity or inner self is able to be expressed in terms of form, colour or the way in which paint is applied: [T]he impulse and gestural brushwork in my paintings allow for the manifestation of an inner state of mind. To think about 41

Can Never Really Come Together 1979 oil stick with traces of pencil on Mylar Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 1980

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my work metonymically is to understand that the abstract dimension of the painting is integrated with an inner reality. Rather than by the development of shapes, it is the different ways of handling the paint that allow a Western artist’s subjectivity to fuse with the work.21 As Ingrid Periz writes in this publication, Australian Aboriginal art and ways of thinking were also increasingly important for Green and thus entered her discussions of metonymy. When included in the Queensland Art Gallery’s exhibition Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences, Green spoke of the spiritual quality of Aboriginal art and culture, but clarified that her work was not invested with spirituality: ‘in my paintings I seek to evoke the deepest levels of emotion, but not as a vehicle for religious feeling’.22 Music may also offer a way of understanding metonymy. In 2010, the circular rhythms of Blue Quadrant recurred in a markedly different work entitled After Lightnin’ Hopkins. This time there is no emphatic calligraphic gesture or bold oilstick. Instead, Green employed pencil and paper collage using Color-aid paper, with each resulting image mounted on a small rectangular wooden block. Comprising 45 blocks in total, the work is installed in a wall-based grid formation, with the blocks placed in horizontal bands roughly in the shape of an inverted pyramid, which was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s wall relief Modular Structure (1977).23 Named after the country blues singer and guitarist from Texas, After Lightnin’ Hopkins, like Blue Quadrant, mixes a soaring energy with an equilibrium based on a geometric foundation. The underlying white wall creates spatial intervals that add to the syncopated rhythm of the work.

The Flower, the Garden, the Ground For an artist living in New York, the early 2000s brought a different tenor to everyday life. Emotion and more specifically trauma linked to place become apparent in the works that Green made in response to the events of 11 September 2001 (commonly referred to as 9/11), when terrorists flew planes into New York’s World Trade Center, resulting in their collapse and the loss of thousands of lives. Green viewed the tragedy unfold from her studio and admits to being ‘traumatised by witnessing the attack’.24 Paintings such as Ground Zero – as the site of the collective memorial became known – and September Morn (2003), which respond to this event, are invested with collective emotion. As Jacquelyn Micieli-Voutsinas has argued, ‘emotional geographies frame the emotional significance of the World Trade Center and help to navigate the affective spaces produced in conjunction with its remembrance and memorialization.’25 In a sense, Green’s paintings produce such an ‘affective space’ for remembrance.

In them, she utilises a screen of parallel vertical lines suggestive of those that featured on the architectural façade of the World Trade Center, while the array of tumbling vessels recall her earlier representations of Etruscan vessels as well as funerary urns. In these works, Green also moves away from a square format to a narrow horizontal plane – as if deliberately avoiding the ‘towers’ or acknowledging their collapse – but returns to the fields of monochromatic colour that had featured in her New Image paintings of the late 1970s, when single figurative elements were suspended centrally within the field. We might even recall the photographs of people jumping prior to the towers collapsing. Such photographs arrested that moment while at the same 43

Installation view of UAM Project Show, UQ Art Museum, 2005. A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose … (Ramanujan) 2005 is at right; A Rose Is A Rose (Marvin) 2005, at left, is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Photo: Carl Warner following page: After Lightnin’ Hopkins 2009–2011 Color-aid paper collage and coloured pencil on mount board and wood panel Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2013 Photo: Felix Weinold

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time facilitating replay and an ongoing visceral response. In 1972, Green painted a watercolour entitled World Trade Center Plaza, now in the Kerry Stokes Collection, in which vertical striations radiate across the entire horizontal surface; the image is evocative in hindsight and in its simplicity.

With eerie prescience, Green’s 1975 Ray Hughes Gallery catalogue included a quote

by Paul Stitelman from Arts Magazine of December 1973, in which he stated that ‘her paintings examine the facades of buildings as a permeable surface’ (though his reference is her depiction of light on such façades).

Green’s 9/11 paintings reinstate the fan and vessel shapes of her earlier work as if retrieving something familiar: ‘the fans and vessels were part of an aesthetic vocabulary that had been in my work for many years and that I wanted to re-assert in the midst of the trauma’.26 Elsewhere, of her photo-collages on the Ardennes, Green also describes the fan shape as ‘a familiar and safe motif that I have used throughout my work’.27 If, as Green says of the 9/11 works, ‘the painting conveys that trauma’,28 then they may well signal a personal struggle both to convey as well as to reign in such difficult emotions arising from a personal witnessing. (Notably, another 9/11 painting of 2001 is entitled Re-Witnessing.29) The rose suspended in expanses of a single colour becomes a recurring image in Green’s work from about 2005 to 2011. It may appear as if darkness has lifted, but for Green the rose triggered mixed memories of childhood. Flowers have long been symbolic of both life and death, their fading glory suggestive of life’s passing. In Green’s work, the motif of the rose appeared following the death of her mother in 2003, becoming the subject

of numerous paintings and drawings, including those representing Green in the UAM Project Show at UQ Art Museum in 2005. In these works, the stem is topped by fleshy petals, each drawn either as a single rose or repeated in sequence across a monochromatic field. The sequence of roses may diminish in intensity, as if a portrayal of evanescence, the fading from sight or memory. In Green’s large yellow triptych, A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose … (Ramanujan) (2005), the rose is repeated as a diminishing echo, its title referencing Gertrude Stein and more directly Ramanujan and, by association, metonymy. Here, perhaps, the white rose is offered as a memorial to loss with its past and present pain.

While Green remembers her mother’s love of the rose gardens at Brisbane’s New Farm Park, her descriptions of life with her family are never idyllic. Her writings infer that her mother played a significant role in taking her out of school, and make reference to her being her father’s favourite despite his ‘health and habits’ and her mother’s ‘quiet resentment’, while her mother’s gardening created ‘a bulwark of beauty to keep the darker reality of life at bay’.30 Green’s own safe haven as a child was the space under their Queensland home – a wooden house raised up on stilts – with the lower area enclosed by vertical wooden slats that filtered light and where she could draw (though she recalls once being disturbed by boys who bullied her). Works made in 2010 and 2011, close to the anniversary of 9/11, bring together referents to the rose, the vertical slats of the Brisbane house and the vertical striations of the World Trade Center façade. In Green’s last rose works in 2011, the thorn (the rose’s ‘prickle’) gains in prominence and intensity, becoming malevolent and menacing.

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Such works again demonstrate her use of metonymy, in that one part of the thing stands for the whole, and indeed stands for the memories and emotions it elicits. In Sketch for a Painting (2011), Green drew in heavy charcoal on separate sheets of paper three large thorns that are reminiscent of an eagle’s talons or beak. Here the thorn, and by implication the rose, stands for a somewhat fraught childhood relationship with her mother and her mother’s death, while, as talon/beak, it references also the threat and trauma of 9/11. This metonymic reading must include Green’s execution of these heavy forms for, as Green says, ‘To think about my work metonymically is to understand that the abstract dimension of the paintings is integrated with an inner reality.’31 The most recent works by Green to be acquired by UQ are two photo-collages that both include black-and-white photographs of the landscape of the Ardennes: Ardennes Uncovered: Fall (2015) and Ardennes Uncovered: Memory 1 (Variant) 2015.

Across the scenes of nondescript landscape, one with a small bridge and the other with glimpses of a stream, are vertical strips of paper on which Green has drawn coloured abstract markings. The two works are quiet and reflective and become more so when one learns that this terrain was the site of a major battle from December 1944 to January 1945 between the German and Allied forces close to the end of World War II in Europe, in the Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France and Luxembourg. Hitler’s aim was to secure the bridges over the river Meuse, take control of the Belgian port of Antwerp, and split the Allied forces. The so-called Battle of the Bulge saw tens of thousands of casualties on either side as they fought in these forests in freezing temperatures, with the Germans failing in their quest to slow the Allied advance on the Western Front.

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Viewed without their accompanying narrative, the black-and-white photographs may appear bland and unremarkable.

However, the story invests them with a sense of lingering tragedy and trauma.

Such a layering of place with emotion is studied as emotional geography. Writing of Ross Gibson’s book Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, which unravelled layers of dark history on a stretch of road in Central Queensland, George Alexander speaks of the investigative imagination needed to unveil such remnants of ‘psychogeography’: ‘Much of psychogeography addresses the invisible and to understand it requires a suspension of the literal and routine. To advance on it requires the imagination. . .’.32 The landscape chosen by Green is banal – this is not a ‘memorial’ as such, but it is a reminder that bad things can and have happened in such ordinary places.

Many landscapes may harbour a range of emotional registers, some awakened by the telling, some diminishing with familiarity, and some whose stories are long forgotten.

The Australian landscape contains myriad stories of Aboriginal people living within it and of a supressed history of frontier violence. Battlefields sites (which may be no different from those places of frontier violence) are such ‘psychic spaces’ of trauma once lived, ready for remembering.

Green has spoken of the history of the Ardennes, but has gone further to overlay it with a personal history of inter-generational trauma linked to her father’s military history, stating: The most current works . . . are photo collages, based on the images of the Ardennes, which depict major World War II battle sites, where thousands of soldiers from both sides were killed.

I developed these collages based on the inter-generational transmission of

trauma from my father’s involvement with the War. Even though I was not a survivor or victim of the Ardennes trauma, I have a response to the landscape because of the atmosphere in which I grew up.33 Green does not detail how this post-war trauma manifested itself within her family, though elsewhere she has spoken of her suppressed grief at the time of her father’s death in 1969, the year in which she moved to New York. Two decades later, in her paintings of the early 1990s, she adopted a largely black-and-white palette, noting that this was subconsciously associated with a delayed grieving for her father’s death. The painting Stanza #2 (1994) is one such painting, split vertically into dark and light halves, an interior doorway shape offering a sense of transition. In the Ardennes works, the collaged strips of paper on which Green has drawn looping scrolls of colour, as if clouds of tangled, vapourish mesh, provide intervals of space for reflection.

Green’s most recent photo-collages have incorporated colour photographs of the Australian landscape, again disrupted by vertical strips with abstract drawings.34 In this exhibition, her photo-collage King Island (and Subjectivity) Variant (2014) is reproduced in vinyl on the exterior glass façade of the Art Museum. King Island is a tiny island in Moreton Bay off Wellington Point, close to Brisbane; at low tide, people can walk to the island. Green recalls it as ‘a place that was important to me and my family’.35 In the photograph, we see the broad expanse of tidal flats, with the island little more than a green mark on the horizon. The nine strips of paper, with their somewhat sombre drawn markings, stand like sentinels dispersed in the landscape, with only three reaching the

lower edge of the photographic image. The empathetic viewer may sense an emotional undercurrent, but in this work, as in the colour, rhythms and space of After Lightnin’ Hopkins, one may also sense a levity, a release from darker concerns, perhaps even of spiritual or psychological release.

Ingrid Periz has spoken about Green’s reading of Philip Fisher’s book Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (1998) as being significant for works similar to After Lightnin’ Hopkins, and perhaps such a sense of wonder is to be experienced here.36 Green’s recent photo-collages not only draw together concerns that the artist has consistently developed over some four decades, but also return her to images that acknowledge a delight in local neighbourhoods, be it the newcomer’s wonder at living in Manhattan or the artist returning home to rekindle memories of once-visited landscapes with the wonders of light and space they contain. Darker undercurrents may remain linked to these places, but perhaps there are moments for the light fantastic.

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1.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski, introduction

by Richard Kearney (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 69.

2.

A. K. Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 23, no. 1 (1989): 51.

3.

Images of four Laight Street paintings, each depicting building façades, featured on the cover of Green’s Ray Hughes Gallery catalogue of 1975.

4.

Acquisition record, UQ Art Museum artist’s file.

5.

A watercolour Study for Ericsson Place (c.

1974–1975) was donated by the Queensland Art Gallery Society to that institution in 1975.

6.

Ericsson Place had been included in this Whitney exhibition, and in 1975 shows at Hogarth Galleries, Sydney, and Ray Hughes Gallery. Acquisition record, UQ Art Museum artist’s file.

7.

8.

9.

Can Never Really Come Together was included in Green’s AGNSW Project 32 exhibition. An Australia Council Visual Arts Board (VAB) grant of 1974 had secured Green studio time in which to paint works such as Ericsson Place, and in 1978 she received an Overseas Travel Grant from the same source. For an account of Green’s continuing relationship with Australia, see Frances Lindsay, “Resonating in Australia,” in Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey (South Yarra, Vic.: Minneapolis, MN: Macmillan Art Publishing; University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 30–46.

By 1970, the post-Minimalist artist Eva Hesse had died, followed by Robert Smithson in 1973; Hesse was born in 1936 and Smithson in 1938, almost 10 years before Green was born in 1946. Morris himself was born in 1931.

“Green Taken in by the US,” Interview by Heather Kennedy, The Age, 9 March 1985, Extra, 10.

10. Both are co-published by Macmillan Art Publishing (South Yarra, Vic.) and University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN).

11. Denise Green, “The Impact of Joseph Beuys,” in Green, Metonymy in Contemporary Art, 45; See also Anthony Bond, “Ontology Is at the Heart of It,” in Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey, 47–64.

12. Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline (New

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York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1996), 160.

13. Regarded as the world’s first ‘blockbuster’ exhibition, Treasures of Tutankhamun was exhibited in many art museums around the globe. It was at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from November 1976 to March 1977 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from December 1978 to April 1979.

See “Treasures of Tutunkhamun,” National Gallery of Australia website, http://www. nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/1976/ tutankhamun_treasures.html.

14. Denise Green, interview with the artist, New York, 12 November 2012.

15. This is from a 1978 interview with Linda Shearer, quoted in Roland Mönig, “The Image as a Vessel,” in Denise Green (Kleve, Germany: Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 2006), 15.

16. Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” 41–58; Alan Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross Cultural Psychology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

17. Green, “The 1980s: Asia and Its Influence: The Indian Experience,” in Green Metonymy in Contemporary Art, 83–84.

18. Ramanujan speaks here of ‘indexical signs – the signifier and the signified belong in the same context’. Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” 50.

19. Green, “The 1980s: Asia and Its Influence,” 85.

20. Ibid., 86. original emphasis.

21. Green, “Some Limitations on Clement Greenberg’s Writings: Referencing Aboriginal Vision,” in Metonymy in Contemporary Art, 21.

22. Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1990), 53.

23. The LeWitt reference is noted in a transcript based on interviews conducted between Denise Green and Wilson Duggan from November 2012 to May 2013, UQ Art Museum artist’s file.

When After Lightnin’ Hopkins was exhibited in 2011 at Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus, Augsburg, Germany, the exhibition title acknowledged those artists important to her in making these works: Denise Green: After Ju Chao, Ju Lian, Richter, Wiebke, LeWitt, Albers, Manet.

24. Green, “A Brisbane Beginning,” in An Artist’s Odyssey, 75–76.

25. Green, “Some Limitations of Clement Greenberg’s Writings,” 21; Green’s rose (and thorn) images may contain symbolic references, for the rose is both the national floral emblem of the US and the official New York State flower, while, in terms of talon-like thorns in Sketch for a Painting, the bald eagle is the emblem of the US, representing freedom, providing further, if perhaps contradictory, references to the 9/11 disaster.

26. Ross Gibson, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2002); George Alexander, “The Psychic Space of the Horror Stretch,” realtime 54, April–May 2003: 4, http://www. realtimearts.net/article/issue54/7040.

27. Denise Green, “The German Context,” Denise Green: Saarschleife/River Loop (Merzig/ Saar, Germany: Museum Schloss Fellenberg, 2015–2016), 17.

28. Denise Green and Kerry Stokes, “The Australian and New York Art Worlds,” in An Artist’s Odyssey, 159; Green describes watching the Towers from her studio in “Seeing the Attack: 11 September 2001,” in Green, Metonymy in Contemporary Art, 126–131.

29. Jacquelyn Micieli-Voutsinas, “Rummaging through the Wreckage: Geographies of Trauma, Memory and Loss at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center” (PhD thesis, Syracuse University, New York, 2014), 24, http://surface.syr.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1126&context=etd.

30. Green and Stokes, “The Australian and New York Art Worlds,” 159.

31. Green, “The German Context,” 17.

32. Green and Stokes, “The Australian and New York Art Worlds,” 159.

33. ReWitnessing is held in the Kerry Stokes Collection.

34. Green’s photo-collages incorporating landscapes of the Bendigo area were included in the exhibition Form, Subjectivity, Paradox: Denise Green at the VAC | La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, 2015.

35. Denise Green, email to the author, 11 December 2014.

36. Ingrid Periz, “Form, Subjectivity, Paradox,” in Form, Subjectivity, Paradox: Denise Green (Bendigo: VAC | La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, 2015), 9.

previous page: Ardennes Uncovered: Memory 1 (Variant) 2015 pigment print and drawing on paper Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016 Photo: Robert Kastler following page: Mercer Street 1972 synthetic polymer paint on canvas

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above: Hudson 1974 pen and ink on paper left: Passing Ship 1974 pen and ink on paper

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above: Green Architecture 1973 pencil and watercolour on paper right: Bridged 1975 pen and ink and watercolour on paper

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Passing Laight 1976 oil on canvas

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Play (Black) 1977 oil and wax on canvas

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above: #2 Jar 1978 pen and ink on paper left: #3 Jars 1978 pen and ink on paper above right: Marker #1 1979 pen and ink and graphite on grid paper right: Marker #2 1979 pen and ink and graphite on grid paper

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above: Woman with a Disc 1976 pen and ink on paper left: Girl with Ball 1976 pen and ink on paper

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above: Bust in Shadow #2 1976 pen and ink on paper right: #1 Australia 1976 pen and ink on paper

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Scans 1979–1980 oil and wax on canvas

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Almost All 1979 oil and wax on canvas

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Disperse #4 1978 oil on canvas

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clockwise from top left: Slope 1980 oil stick on contour paper Something that Exists in South Indian Dance 1981 oil stick on contour paper Scope V 1981 wax stick on Mylar #2 Arc 1981 oil stick on contour paper

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They Kneele, They Kisse 1980 pen and ink, watercolour and oil stick on Mylar

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from left to right: Grey Parrot #9 1986 dyed Indian handmade paper and wire Blue Mayur 7 1986 dyed Indian handmade paper and wire Aaroh Avroh #3 1986 dyed Indian handmade paper and wire

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Repetition 1989 oil and paint stick on canvas

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Duane Triangle 1988 oil and paint stick on canvas Collection of The University of Queensland Gift of Michael Rayner AM through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2014

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top row left to right: Spring and All #10 1986 Fables #2 1986 Fable #3 1986 Climate 1986 (Reproduced only) Spring and All #22 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper

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bottom row left to right: Spring and All #9 1986 Fables #4 1986 Fable #5 1986 Seasons 1986 Spring and All #20 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper

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Une Aventure MĂŠthodique 1986 paint stick on canvas

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Linear Traceries 1989 paint stick on paper vellum Collection of The University of Queensland Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2013

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Lark 1990 oil and wax on canvas

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from left to right: July 27, 1993 #3 1993 oil on canvas July 27, 1993 #8 1993 oil on canvas Refrain 1994 oil on canvas

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from left to right: Scallywag 1992 oil on canvas Punch 1992 oil on canvas Two Vessels 1992 oil on canvas Collection of The University of Queensland Gifts of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009

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Stanza #2 1994 oil on canvas

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Blue and White Form W2 1994 paint stick on paper vellum Collection of The University of Queensland Gift of Michael Rayner AM through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2014

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Circa Series #1 – #30 1992–1996 mixed media on paper

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Untitled #2 Blue Wash 1996 pen and ink, watercolour, pastel and charcoal on paper

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Studies in Wash #1 1996 watercolour, ink, charcoal and oil crayon on paper

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Slip of the Mind #3 (Also known as #9 Wash Series in Plum) 1996 watercolour, charcoal, pastel and oil crayon on paper

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#1 Blue Wash 1996 watercolour, ink, pastel, charcoal and oil crayon on paper

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Azzurro di Cobalto Puro 1998 synthetic polymer paint on canvas

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top row left to right: #19 Forest Hills 1999 #16 Forest Hills 1999 #2 Credo 1999 #11 Forest Hills 1999 middle row left to right: #12 Forest Hills 1999 #1 Credo 1999 #18 Forest Hills 1999 #6 Credo 1999 bottom row left to right: #3 Forest Hills 1999 #5 Forest Hills 1999 #19 Credo 1999 #20 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper

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top row left to right: 35 Brisbane 2002 22 Brisbane 2002 32 Brisbane 2002 31 Brisbane 2002 7 Brisbane 2002 27 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper

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bottom row left to right: 14 Brisbane 2002 15 Brisbane 2002 33 Brisbane 2002 11 Brisbane 2002 36 Brisbane 2002 34 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper

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Stake-out 2001 synthetic polymer paint on canvas

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September Morn 2003 synthetic polymer paint on canvas

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Chrome Yellow 2003 pencil, watercolour, crayon, and airbrush synthetic polymer paint on paper

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Kleve (Katsura) 2003 pencil, watercolour, crayon, and airbrush synthetic polymer paint on paper

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A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose ... (Ramanujan) 2005 synthetic polymer paint and marble dust on canvas Collection of The University of Queensland Gift of Denise Green, 2015

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Sepia 2010 pencil, ink, charcoal, ContĂŠ crayon and oil crayon on paper Forest Green 2010 pencil, ink, charcoal, ContĂŠ crayon and oil crayon on paper

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Newest Image 2006 pencil on paper Ripples 2006 ink over pencil on paper

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Lone 2006 pen and ink over pencil on paper

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Rose Squared 2008 coloured synthetic polymer primer, pencil and oil crayon on canvas

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Sketch for a Painting 2011 charcoal on paper Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2012

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King Island (and Subjectivity) Variant 2014 Photo: Warren Green Private Collection Photo: Robert Kastler (Reproduced in vinyl on glass faรงade of UQ Art Museum.)

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DENISE GREEN Born 1946, Melbourne, Australia. Lives and works in New York, USA. Awarded Order of Australia, 2007.

Education 1976 1969 1966–1969

Master of Fine Arts, Hunter College, New York Studied, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris Studied, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2016 After the Saar, Gallery 9, Sydney Denise Green: Beyond and Between – A Painter’s Journey, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane 2015 paintings, drawings, photographs, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, USA Form, Subjectivity, Paradox, VAC / La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo, Victoria

Museum Schloss Fellenberg, Metzig, Germany

Galerie Cora & Daniela Hölzl, Düsseldorf, Germany 2014 NKN Gallery, Melbourne Chroma/Chronos, Australian Club, Melbourne 2013 Trans-Form, Galerie Cora & Daniela Hölzl, Düsseldorf, Germany Lines & Margins, Block Projects, Melbourne 2012 Roses, Thorns, Stems, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Wonder: The Rainbow, Arc One Gallery, Melbourne 2011 After Ju Chao, Ju Lian, Richter, Wiebke, LeWitt, Albers, Manet, Kunstsammlungen and

Museeun Augsburg Neue Galerie, Höhmannhaus, Augsburg, Germany Wonder & Malevolence, Galerie Heike Curtze, Vienna, Austria 2010 Wonder & Evanescence, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, USA Beyond Richter, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney 2009 A Line Is Never Just a Line: Indian Papers, Roses and Grids, Galerie Cora Hölzl, Düsseldorf, Germany Evanescence, TarraWarra Museum, Melbourne

Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne

Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth 2008 Denise Green: Out West, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth

Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth Then and Now, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney 2007 “Weh Dem, Der Symbole Sieht!” Galerie Heike Curtze, Berlin, Germany Magischer Tausch, Galerie Cora Hölzl, Düsseldorf, Germany 2006 Retrospective, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

Arco Art Fair, Galerie Heike Curtze booth, Madrid 2005 UAM Project Show, University Art Museum, The University of Queensland, Brisbane Ink Figures, Galerie Heike Curtze, Vienna, Austria

Annandale Galleries, Sydney

Schubert Galleries, Main Beach, Queensland Paper, Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St Louis, USA 2004 Galerie Marlies Hanstein, Saarbrucken, Germany Museum des Landkreises Saarlouis fur Vor-Und Fruhgeschichte, Dillingen-Pachten, Germany 2003 Affinities with Joseph Beuys. Before and After September 11. Retrospective, Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken, Germany Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 2002 Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, New York, USA 2001 Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, USA A 25 Year Survey, Brisbane City Gallery, Brisbane; toured to Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Sherman Galleries Goodhope, Sydney Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA 2000–2001 Paintings and Works on Paper 1975–2000, National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zacheta, Warsaw; toured to Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, and Stadthaus Klagenfurt, Alpen-Adria Galerie, Klagenfurt, Austria 2000 Works on Paper: 1976–1999, Cummings Art Center, Connecticut College, New London, USA; Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 1999–2000 Paintings 1972–1999, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center/Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; toured to Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, USA, and Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Connecticut, USA 1999 Sherman Galleries Goodhope, Sydney Galerie Asbæk, Copenhagen, Denmark 1998–2000 Works On Paper 1972–1998, Wollongong City Gallery, New South Wales; toured to Geraldton City Gallery and Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, Western Australia; Geelong Regional Art Gallery, Victoria; Albury Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales 1997 Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 1996 NAP Exhibition Space, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, USA 1995 Peter Bellas Gallery, Brisbane 1994 Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

Raab Galerie, Berlin, Germany 1992 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 1991 Delaney Galleries, Perth

Peter Bellas Gallery, Brisbane

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 1989 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 1988 Eight Year Survey 1980–88, University Gallery, University of Melbourne, Melbourne

Althea Viafora Gallery, New York, USA

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 1987 Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ahmedabad, India New Papers: India Work, Althea Viafora Gallery, New York, USA

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 1986 M13 Gallery, New York, USA Anand Sarabhai Studio, Ahmedabad, India

Galerie Albert Baronian, Brussels, Belgium Language and Impulse and Visual Dialogue, Althea Viafora Gallery, New York, USA Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 1985 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne Ten Year Survey 1975–85, Center for the Arts, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA 1984 Exposition: Denise Green, Ville de Liege Musée d’Art Moderne, Liege, Belgium

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1983 Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

Gallery A, Sydney 1982 Axiom Gallery, Melbourne

Mulvane Art Center, Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, USA

Gallery A, Sydney

Ado Gallery, Bonheiden, Belgium 1981 Paintings, Institute for Art and Urban Resources at The Clocktower, New York, USA

Gloria Luria Gallery, Bay Harbor, Florida, USA Striped: A Performance with Elizabeth Sacre, Franklin Furnace, New York, USA Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA 1980 Project Show, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Galerie Albert Baronian, Brussels Paintings and Drawings, Protetch-Mcintosh Gallery, Washington DC, USA Ellipses, Okun-Thomas Gallery, St Louis, USA Ellipses, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA To Avoid Saying Goodnight: A Performance with Elizabeth Sacre, Side FX, Sydney, and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 1978 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA Coventry Gallery, Sydney 1977 20 Recent Drawings, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

Max Protetch Gallery, Washington DC, USA

School of Art Gallery, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne 1976 Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA 1975 Whitney Museum Art Resources Center, New York, USA

Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane

Hogarth Galleries, Sydney 1973 98 Greene Street, New York, USA Selected Group Exhibitions 2016 ‘Yoknapatawpha’ Biënnale of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Duerle, Belgium

From Then to Now, NKN Gallery, Melbourne 2015 Frontiers Re-Imagined, Palazzo Grimani Museum, Venice, Italy (part of the 56th International Exhibition of Art, Venice Biennale) The New Collection Part VII, H2 – Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst Augsburg, Germany 2014 David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA 2013 New Image/New Image Painting, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA 40 for 40: Recent Gifts to the Permanent Collection, Singer Gallery, Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas, USA Vista, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne The Unusual Suspects, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Summer Group Show, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong 8 Women / 8 Stories, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong OneDayStand, Daniela & Cora Hoelz, Düsseldorf, Germany 2012 Installment 1, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, USA Inside Out: A Group Show, Sundaram Tagore, Singapore 2011 Perspectives: Nine Women, Nine Views, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, USA 2010 Destruction & Renewal, Richard J. Massey Foundation for Arts and Sciences, New York, USA New Creative Constructs, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, USA GET smART, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth Imaging the Apple, AC Institute (Direct Chapel), New York, USA Rasa: Contemporary Asian Art, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Los Angeles, USA Normal Editions Workshop Collaborative: Prints, 1976–2008, Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA 2009 Here and Now, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, USA Abstraction 8, Mostly Minimal & Monochrome, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne Summer Exhibition, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney Annual Faculty Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA Faculty Collects, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA 2008 Art Karlsruhe 2008, Galerie Cora Hoelzl booth, Karlsruhe, Germany When You Think about Art, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne, Melbourne 2007 Summer Exhibition, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney Cornice Art Fair, Galerie Heike Curtze Booth, Venice, Italy Revue – 10 Jahre Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany Viennafair International Art Fair, Heike Curtze Booth, Vienna, Austria Marks from The Matrix: Collaborative Limited Edition Prints 1976–2006, Normal Editions Workshop, University Galleries, Illinois State University,

Normal, Illinois, USA 2006 The Salon, Dick Betts Gallery, Hobart Sixth Drawing Biennale, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra Summer Exhibition, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney 2005 The Christian Community, Melbourne Drawings by the Faculty, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA 2004 Acquisitions 2003–2004, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, New South Wales 2003 The Return of Beauty, Kristen Frederickson Contemporary Art, New York, USA 2001 Tribeca Temporary, New York, USA Invitational, Parkland Art Gallery, Champaign, Illinois, USA Acquisitions, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, New South Wales Recent Acquisitions, Wollongong City Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales

Sherman Galleries, Sydney 2000 Galerie Asbæk, Copenhagen, Denmark Sherman Galleries, Sydney 1999–2000 New Acquisitions, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, New South Wales 1999 Visy Board Art Prize, Richmond Grove Winery, Tanunda, South Australia 1998 Gold Coast City Conrad Jupiters Art Prize, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Queensland The Mécénat Collection, Sherman Galleries, Sydney Landfall Press: 25 Years of Printmaking, Davenport Museum of Art, Davenport, Iowa, USA 1997 Sherman Galleries, Sydney International Print Exhibition, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, USA Landfall Press: 25 Years of Printmaking, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, USA The Appeal of Handmade Paper, Gallery in the Champion Lobby, Stamford, Connecticut, USA

Za Moca Gallery, Tokyo, Japan Painting Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA 1996 Landfall Press: 25 Years of Printmaking, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA

Raab Gallery, Berlin, Germany 1995 A Woman’s View, World Bank, Washington DC, USA Northern Light, Raab Galerie at the Cologne Art Fair, Cologne, Germany 1994 Landscape Works by Women Artists, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA

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1993

Raab Galerie, Berlin, Germany The Black Show, Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, Victoria; toured to Nolan Gallery, Lanyon, Canberra; Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales; Waverley City Gallery and Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria

Raab Galerie, Berlin, Germany

Galerie Arte & Altri, Milan, Spain 1992 Galerie Artline, The Hague, The Netherlands Slow Art: Painting in New York Now, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA 1991 Geometric Perspectives, Art Lending Service, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA 1990 No Trends, Nahan Contemporary Gallery, New York, USA New Approaches to Abstract Art, Tower Fine Arts Gallery, Brockport State University, New York, USA Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Campus Collections, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney 1989 Landfall at the Aspen Museum, Aspen Museum, Aspen, Colorado, USA Evolutions, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 1988 Seventeen Years at the Barn, Rosa Esman Gallery, New York, USA Nature In Art, One Penn Plaza, New York, USA ‘The Cocktail Party’, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Ideas from Individual Impressions and Marks: Prints of Non Printmakers, Lehigh University Art Gallery, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA 1987 A Decade of Emerging Artists: Selections from the Exxon Series, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA Still Life, Medium of Modern Art, Art Lending Service, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA Dwellings, Althea Viafora Gallery, New York, USA Backlash: The Australian Drawing Revival, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Painters and Sculptors: Diversity in Contemporary Australian Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Chaos, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Window on Australian Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; toured to the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan 1986 From Icon to Symbol: Imagery in American Art 1973–79, Blum Helman Warehouse, New York,USA

Althea Viafora Gallery, New York, USA Spirit Tracks: New Abstract Drawing, Pratt Institute Gallery, New York, USA Surface for Reflection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; toured to the following New South Wales venues: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale; Newcastle Regional Art Gallery; Orange Regional Gallery; Wollongong City Gallery; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Albury Regional Art Gallery Resistant Spirit, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Big Abstract Drawings, Hogarth Galleries, Sydney 1985 Ten Years of Activity: 1974–84, Centre International D’experimentation Artistique Marie-Louise Jeanneret, Boissano, Italy Women Artists at the Palladium, Palladium, New York, USA What’s Up… Down Under, Limelight, New York, USA

Paul Cava Gallery, Philadelphia, USA

Barbara Toll Gallery, New York, USA Invitational Art Purchase Exhibition, University of New South Wales, Sydney Queensland Works: 1950–1985, University Art Museum, The University of Queensland, Brisbane Abstract Painting as Surface and Object, Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, Long Island, New York, USA Untitled, 1984, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA Group Show, Galerie Garces Vylazquez, Bogota, Columbia Drawing with Respect to Painting, New York Studio School, New York, USA Timeline, organized by Group Material, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA Invitational Group Show, O.K. Harris Gallery, New York, USA

Susan Montezinos Gallery, Philadelphia, USA Triptychs, Edith Blum Institute, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA 1983 Painting and Sculpture, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA Acquisitions 1973–83, University Art Museum, The University of Queensland, Brisbane Extra Critical Role, Gabrielle Byers Gallery, New York, USA Taste, Place and Transition, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, City Art Institute, Sydney 1982 Women Artists – Group Exhibition, Gallery A, Sydney Brown Invitational, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA Mulvane Art Center, Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, USA Currents in the 80s, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA Tyler Visiting Artists 82–83, Tyler School of Art of Temple University, Philadelphia, USA Figuration and Configuration, Okun-Thomas Gallery, St Louis, USA Artists from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Guild Hall, Easthampton, New York New American Painters, John C. Stoller Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne University, Melbourne Contemporary Still Lives, Traveling exhibition organized by Art Lending Service, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA 1981 A Painting Show, Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago, USA Contemporary Drawings, AD&A Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA Currents: A New Mannerism, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, USA Quick and Dirty, Herron Gallery, Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA New Art II: Surfaces/Textures, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA Australia Perspecta ‘81, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney A Range of Contemporary Drawings, Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes College, Pennsylvania, USA Small Works, Art Latitude Gallery, New York, USA Arabia Felix, Art Galaxy, New York, USA Drawing Selection, William Patterson College, Wayne, New Jersey, USA Currents, Trends for the ‘80’s, Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville, USA Works on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA

Galerie Maier-Hahn, Dusseldorf, Germany Drawing Invitational, Harm Bouchaert Gallery, New York, USA 1980 Okun-Thomas Gallery, St Louis, USA Drawings of a Different Nature, Portland Center for Visual Arts, Portland, Oregon, USA Painting and Sculpture Show, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, USA New NY on Paper, Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, USA

Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA The Image Transformed, Art Latitude Gallery, New York, USA Still Life Today, Goddard-Riverside Community Center, New York; toured to the following New York venues: Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center Gallery, Fredonia; Tyler Fine Arts Gallery, Oswego; Root Art Center, Clinton; College of St. Rose Art Gallery, Alba; Skidmore College Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers; Prendergast Library Association, Jamestown 1979 Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA 24” x 24”, Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York, USA

Work on Paper, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA Small Is Beautiful, Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania, USA; toured to Center Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA

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1978 Young American Artists: 1978 Exxon National Exhibition, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA Disengi, Bonoma Diffusione Arte, Bari, Italy New Image Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA The Minimal Image, Protetch-Mcintosh Gallery, Washington DC, USA

The $100 Gallery, New York, USA Inaugural Exhibition, Max Protetch Gallery (on Lafayette Street), New York, USA

Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 1977 The Painting Show, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA 24” x 24”, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, USA Works and Projects of the Seventies, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA

Protetch-Mcintosh Gallery, Washington DC, USA 1976 New Gallery Artists, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA 1975 Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, USA 1974 Contemporary Reflections, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, New York, USA Inside-Outside, Women’s Interart Center, New York, USA Recent Acquisitions of the Power Bequest, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney New Talent Exhibition, Forum Gallery, New York, USA Faculty Art Exhibit, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, New Jersey, USA 1972 Paintings on Paper, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA Publications Authored books 2012 2005

Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey (South Yarra, Vic.; Minneapolis, MN: Macmillan Art Publishing; University of Minnesota Press).

Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm (South Yarra, Vic.; Minneapolis, MN: Macmillan Art Publishing; University of Minnesota Press).

Authored essays 2014 1998 1996 1994 1971–1972

“Subjectivity and Artistic Intent,” Asian Art News (January/February 2014).

“Map of Groote Eylandt,” Art & Australia 35, no. 2 (1998): 200.

“Painting Post-Greenberg,” Art Monthly Australia (March 1996): 20–23.

“Painterly Thought and the Unconscious,” Art Press (February 1994): E1–E5, 20–24.

“In the Galleries and Museums,” Arts, New York (various issues, under name of Denise Wolmer).

Works in Public Collections Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona, USA Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, USA Department of State, Washington, DC, USA Embassy of Australia, Washington, DC, USA Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden, Germany Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, USA John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth Kunstsammlungen und Museen Stadt Augsburg, Germany Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA MIT, Whitehead Institute, Boston, USA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales Parliament House, Canberra Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane QUT Art Museum, Brisbane Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken, Germany Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA Stadthaus Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane Works in Corporate Collections Amerada Hess, New York, USA American Can Company/Primerica, Greenwich, USA British Petroleum, Cleveland, USA Champion International Corporation, Stamford, USA First National Bank, Seattle, USA General Mills, Minneapolis, USA Hyatt Hotels, Melbourne JP Morgan/Chase Art Collection, New York, USA The Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth Macquarie Bank, Melbourne Merrill Lynch, New York, USA National Bank of Australia, Melbourne Owens/Corning Glass, Toledo, Ohio, USA Parliament House, Canberra Sony Corporation, New York, USA US Bank, Minneapolis, USA Wesfarmers Collection, Perth The Westpac Bank, Sydney and New York

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Measurements are in centimetres, height x width x depth, and describe the image/object only.

All works of art are from The Denise Green / Francis X. Claps Collection gifted through The University of Queensland in America, Inc. Foundation. The University of Queensland, 2013, unless otherwise indicated.

Mercer Street 1972 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 151.07 x 212.0 cm Poetry 1972 oil on canvas 91.4 x 122.0 cm Green Architecture 1973 pencil and watercolour on paper image/sheet 20.5 x 29.7 cm Hudson 1974 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 23.0 x 27.0 cm Passing Ship 1974 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 22.1 x 30.7 cm Ericsson Place 1975 oil on canvas 60.5 x 60.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 1977.

Bridged 1975 pen and ink and watercolour on paper image/sheet 22.5 x 30.6 cm Island and Bridge #1 with Tree 1975 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 122.0 x 122.0 cm Passing Laight 1976 oil on canvas 61.0 x 61.0 cm #1 Australia 1976 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 31.4 x 31.9 cm Bust in Shadow #2 1976 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 31.1 x 31.6 cm Girl with Ball 1976 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 31.0 x 31.4 cm Woman with a Disc 1976 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 32.4 x 33.0 cm Play (Black) 1977 oil and wax on canvas 151.0 x 151.0 cm Villa Giulia 1977 oil on canvas 151.0 x 151.0 cm Woman-Hood 1977 oil and wax on canvas 150.5 x 151.0 cm #2 Jar 1978 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 32.5 x 32.8 cm #3 Jars 1978 pen and ink on paper image/sheet 32.8 x 32.8 cm Disperse #4 1978 oil on canvas 151.0 x 151.0 cm Can Never Really Come Together 1979 oil stick with traces of pencil on Mylar image/sheet 51.0 x 63.3 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 1980.

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Marker #1 1979 pen and ink and graphite on grid paper image/sheet 38.5 x 52.5 cm

Une Aventure Méthodique 1986 paint stick on canvas 166.5 x 168.0 cm

Marker #2 1979 pen and ink and graphite on grid paper image/sheet 38.7 x 52.4 cm

Duane Triangle 1988 oil and paint stick on canvas 182.0 x 180.2 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Michael Rayner AM through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2014.

Almost All 1979 oil and wax on canvas two parts, overall 213.0 x 213.0 cm Slope 1980 oil stick on contour paper image/sheet 51.0 x 66.0 cm They Kneele, They Kisse 1980 pen and ink, watercolour and oil stick on Mylar image/sheet 50.2 x 63.3 cm Scans 1979–1980 oil and wax on canvas two parts, overall 182.0 x 182.0 cm #2 Arc 1981 oil stick on contour paper image/sheet 50.5 x 65.5 cm Scope V 1981 wax stick on Mylar image/sheet 51.0 x 62.5 cm Something That Exists in South Indian Dance 1981 oil stick on contour paper image/sheet 50.9 x 64.5 cm The Old Montauk Highway 1982 oil and paint stick on canvas 163.0 x 164.5 cm Blue Quadrant 1984 paint stick, oil crayon, and charcoal on canvas 191.7 x 236.7 cm Aaroh Avroh #3 1986 dyed Indian handmade paper and wire image/sheet 65.0 x 83.0 cm Blue Mayur 7 1986 dyed Indian handmade paper and wire image/sheet 65.0 x 84.5 cm Grey Parrot #9 1986 dyed Indian handmade paper and wire image/sheet 65.0 x 83.5 cm Fables #2 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 25.3 x 35.5 cm Fable #3 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 25.2 x 35.8 cm Fables #4 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 24.2 x 34.2 cm Fable #5 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 22.7 x 31.7 cm Seasons 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 22.0 x 31.0 cm Spring and All #9 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 24.2 x 34.5 cm Spring and All #10 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 25.0 x 35.6 cm Spring and All #20 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 23.8 x 34.0 cm Spring and All #22 1986 charcoal and paint stick on paper image/sheet 24.3 x 34.7 cm

Linear Traceries 1989 paint stick on paper vellum image 76.5 x 90.5 cm sheet 88.0 x 102.4 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2013.

Repetition 1989 oil and paint stick on canvas 166.0 x 166.5 cm Lark 1990 oil and wax on canvas 162.5 x 163.0 cm Punch 1992 oil on canvas 35.5 x 35.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009.

Two Vessels 1992 oil on canvas 35.5 x 35.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009.

Scallywag 1992 oil on canvas 35.5 x 35.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009.

Circa Series #1 – #30 1992–1996 mixed media on paper 30 parts, each image/sheet 20.2 x 15.1 cm July 27, 1993 #3 1993 oil on canvas 35.3 x 35.5 cm July 27, 1993 #8 1993 oil on canvas 35.5 x 35.5 cm Refrain 1994 oil on canvas 35.7 x 35.0 cm Stanza #2 1994 oil on canvas 172.0 x 179.5 cm Blue and White Form W2 1994 paint stick on paper vellum image 61.0 x 91.0 cm sheet 71.6 x 97.8 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Michael Rayner AM through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2014. #1 Blue Wash 1996 watercolour, ink, pastel, charcoal and oil crayon on paper image/sheet 49.7 x 64.6 cm Untitled #2 Blue Wash 1996 pen and ink, watercolour, pastel and charcoal on paper image/sheet 49.7 x 64.5 cm Slip of the Mind #3 (Also known as #9 Wash Series in Plum) 1996 watercolour, charcoal, pastel and oil crayon on paper image/sheet 49.7 x 64.7 cm

Studies in Wash #1 1996 watercolour, ink, charcoal and oil crayon on paper image/sheet 49.7 x 69.7 cm

22 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.2 x 23.0 cm

Azzurro di Cobalto Puro 1998 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 172.5 x 182.0 cm

27 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.2 x 23.0 cm

#1 Credo 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 29.0 x 22.7 cm

31 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.2 x 23.0 cm

#2 Credo 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.3 x 22.7 cm #6 Credo 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 27.8 x 22.6 cm #19 Credo 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.4 x 22.7 cm #3 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.5 x 20.8 cm #5 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.8 x 20.8 cm #11 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.8 x 20.8 cm #12 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.8 x 20.8 cm #16 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.8 x 20.8 cm #18 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.8 x 20.8 cm #19 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 28.5 x 22.5 cm #20 Forest Hills 1999 watercolour, synthetic polymer paint, crayon, ink and pastel on paper image/sheet 27.7 x 22.7 cm Ground Zero 2001 synthetic polymer paint on canvas two parts, overall 80.5 x 161.0 cm Stake-out 2001 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 171.5 x 176.5 cm 7 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.0 x 23.3 cm 11 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.4 x 23.2 cm 14 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.0 x 23.1 cm

32 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.2 x 23.3 cm 33 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.3 x 23.4 cm 34 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.0 x 22.4 cm 35 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.4 x 23.2 cm

Sketch for a Painting 2011 charcoal on paper three parts, image/sheet each 50.0 x 64.0 cm, overall 50.0 x 195.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2012.

Ardennes Uncovered: Memory 1 (Variant) 2015 pigment print and drawing on paper image/sheet 48.0 x 59.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016.

Ardennes Uncovered: Fall 2015 pigment print and drawing on paper image/sheet 44.0 x 68.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016.

King Island (and Subjectivity) Variant 2014 Photo: Warren Green Private Collection.

(Reproduced in vinyl on glass façade of UQ Art Museum courtesy of the artist.)

36 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.0 x 23.2 cm Chrome Yellow 2003 pencil, watercolour, crayon, and airbrush synthetic polymer paint on paper image/sheet 23.5 x 76.0 cm Kleve (Katsura) 2003 pencil, watercolour, crayon, and airbrush synthetic polymer paint on paper image/sheet 22.5 x 75.5 cm September Morn 2003 synthetic polymer paint on canvas two parts, overall 74.5 x 182.0 cm A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose ... (Ramanujan) 2005 synthetic polymer paint and marble dust on canvas three parts, part a 117.0 x 131.0 cm, part b 131.0 x 161.0 cm, part c 117.0 x 131.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Denise Green, 2015.

Lone 2006 pen and ink over pencil on paper image/sheet 42.7 x 35.3 cm Newest Image 2006 pencil on paper image/sheet 27.6 x 35.5 cm Ripples 2006 ink over pencil on paper image/sheet 27.7 x 35.5 cm Rose Squared 2008 coloured synthetic polymer primer, pencil and oil crayon on canvas 50.0 x 110.0 cm After Lightnin’ Hopkins 2009–2011 Color-aid paper collage and coloured pencil on mount board and wood panel 45 parts, each 7.5 x 15.0 cm, overall 123.5 x 322.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2013.

Forest Green 2010 pencil, ink, charcoal, Conté crayon and oil crayon on paper image/sheet 26.4 x 46.2 cm Sepia 2010 pencil, ink, charcoal, Conté crayon and oil crayon on paper image/sheet 27.3 x 46.6 cm

15 Brisbane 2002 watercolour, crayon, and ink on paper image/sheet 28.4 x 23.1 cm

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Denise Green’s Grey Parrot #9 1986 (detail) and other works made of dyed Indian hand-made paper in Green’s Laight Street Studio, New York, November 2013.

Photo: Michele Helmrich

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Michele Helmrich is Associate Director (Curatorial) at The University of Queensland Art Museum. Recent projects have included exhibitions on artists Rosemary Laing, Lindy Lee, Judy Watson and Fiona Foley, the latter co-curated and presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney. In 2016 she curated Barjai and Miya Studio and, in 2012, Return to Sender and Animal/Human. With Peter Spearritt she co-curated Defending the North: Queensland in the Pacific War (2005) and, with Nick Mitzevich, Margaret Olley: Life’s Journey (2009). She has contributed to various exhibition catalogues, monographs and art magazines.

Ingrid Periz is a writer and curator. A former Harkness Fellow, she attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and taught at New York University and Melbourne University. Her writing has appeared in Art & Text, ARTnews, Antennae, Filmnews and other journals. She has authored a monograph on painter Adam Cullen, Scars Last Longer (2004), and on photographer Jane Burton, Other Stories (2010). She has curated several exhibitions of the work of Robert MacPherson, most recently The Painter’s Reach (2015). Some of her photographs appear in poet Carol Jenkins’s Select Episodes from the Mr Farmhand Series (2016).

Raphael Rubinstein is a New York–based poet and art critic whose numerous books include Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990–2002 (2003), The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (2007) and The Miraculous (2014). He edited the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (2006). The Miraculous was translated into French by Marcel Cohen and published as En quête de miracle (2004). From 1997 to 2007, he was a senior editor at Art in America, where he continues to be a contributing editor. He is currently Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art. In 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

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Artist’s acknowledgments I am so grateful to the many people who made this project possible. The institutional leadership and staff of The University of Queensland played an important role in facilitating the gift of my artworks to the UQ Art Museum.

I’m especially thankful to Dr Campbell Gray for his invaluable support and commitment to the show as well as to Michele Helmrich for her tremendous planning of the exhibition and her excellent and thoughtful essay for the catalogue. In addition to Campbell and Michele, I am most appreciative of the dedication and hard work of the UQ Art Museum team, who worked so comprehensively on accessioning the gift and preparing the exhibition. I am also very privileged and thankful to have Anthony Bond’s ongoing support.

I owe a very special thanks to the contributions of two brilliant and insightful critics, Raphael Rubinstein and Ingrid Periz. They both provided a rich and illuminating context for this body of work. I’m most appreciative of Colby Collier for his guidance and advice in the act of philanthropy and of Alan Roland for his general counsel. I am lucky to have a kind and dedicated brother, Warren, who photographed King Island early one June morning.

Wilson Duggan, Richard Lapham, Janelle Lynch, Mandana Mapar, Khatmeh Osseiran-Hanna, and Laura Westby each contributed enormously to the preparation of the exhibition.

Throughout this project, my husband, Francis Claps, was always there for me and was an endless source of encouragement.

My work is represented by Jan Manton Art, Brisbane; Gallery 9, Sydney; NKN Gallery, Melbourne; Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong; Galerie Heike Curtze and Petra Seiser, Vienna; and Galerie Cora Hölzl and Daniela Hölzl, Düsseldorf.

UQ Art Museum Acknowledgements UQ Art Museum thanks all those individuals and institutions who have helped make this exhibition possible.

We give special thanks to the artist Denise Green AM for her warm enthusiasm and support for the project, and extend our lasting gratitude to both Denise and her husband Dr Francis X. Claps for so generously donating an extensive body of the artist’s works to The University of Queensland. Khatmeh Osseiran-Hanna, Andrew Baker and others assisted with the gift, including Denise Green’s studio assistant Wilson Duggan. We are also grateful for the support of Jan Manton, Denise’s Brisbane dealer.

We thank those who contributed to the publication, especially the authors Ingrid Periz, Raphael Rubinstein and Michele Helmrich, designer Brent Wilson and editor Evie Franzidis. The UQ Art Museum team and student assistants and volunteers assisted with both the gift and the exhibition, with special thanks to those in Registration, Kath Kerswell, Matt Malone, Nick Ashby and Molly Green.

Our thanks also go to those who have assisted with images for the publication, including Judy Gunning at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art; Anita Duquette at Whitney Museum of American Art; Joel Shapiro and Julia Lee at Joel Shapiro Studio; Rachel Garbade at Garth Greenan Gallery; Terrill Warrenburg at Locks Gallery; Hedi El Kholti at Semiotext(e); and Adrienne Fields, Artists Rights Society (ARS). We gratefully acknowledge the anonymous donor who assisted the publication.

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Curator: Michele Helmrich Catalogue design: Brent Wilson Editor: Evie Franzidis Copyright: Kath Kerswell, Matt Malone and Michele Helmrich Printed by: Cornerstone Press, Brisbane Photography: Carl Warner, except as otherwise indicated.

The University of Queensland Art Museum personnel: Dr Campbell Gray, Director Holly Arden, Senior Education Manager Nick Ashby, Museum Preparator Gordon Craig, Project Manager Christian Flynn, Registration Technician Stephanie Baldwin, Advancement Manager Michele Helmrich, Associate Director (Curatorial) Kath Kerswell, Senior Registrar Samantha Littley, Curator Matthew Malone, Registration Officer Sebastian Moody, Digital Communications Officer Melanie Moore, Executive Assistant/Finance & Administration Officer Isabella Baker, Curatorial Assistant Beth Porter, Finance & Administration Coordinator Mariko Post, Visitor Services Officer Alice-Anne Psaltis, Public Programs Officer Jade Williamson, Advancement Manager (Acting) Brent Wilson, Production Manager Install team: Ian Berry, Yannick Blattner, Michael Littler, Kate O’Connor, Caro Toledo THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND ART MUSEUM BOARD: Louise Doyle, Assistant Director-General, Access and Communication, National Archives Professor Tim Dunne, Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Dr Campbell Gray, Director, UQ Art Museum (ex officio) Professor Jason Jacobs, Head, School of Communication and Arts Patricia Danver, Pro-Vice-Chancellor – Advancement (Acting) Professor Alan Rix, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Chairperson) Winthrop Professor Ted Snell, Director, Cultural Precinct, University of Western Australia Dr Jane Wilson, Deputy Chancellor

UQ Art Museum University Drive, St Lucia 07 3365 3046 www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au Open daily 10.00 am – 4.00 pm

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