GUIDO MAESTRI

With a practice that spans over two decades, the Archibald-winning Australian painter and sculptor is renowned for his highly textural, expressive works that explore painted materiality, gesture and observation.

Using an impasto technique, Maestri’s gestural painting practice leaves brush or painting-knife strokes visible. The movement and energy that transpire from his fierce painterly mark-making reveal lush, dynamic and lively landscapes, rendered in bold and non-naturalistic tones.

Referencing its title from the critically endangered Australian species Wollemi Pine, Wollemia presents a new series of paintings that draw upon sites from Maestri’s past alongside imaginary landscapes to creates new, complex and visceral worlds that are simultaneously fantastical and familiar. Reflecting nature’s cycles and depicting ancient ecosystems, this body of work dance between reality and narrative, challenging us to determine what is factual and what is fictional.

As Sally Anderson writes, ’Wollemia confronts us with a visceral, immediate, and sophisticated arrangement of paint and invites us to consider our relationship to, and experience of, the natural world... they represent a clash of worlds; real and imagined, ancient and modern, pre-colonial and post-colonial, native and foreign, familiar and unfamiliar and as Gombrich statesin Art and Illusion ‘the familiar will always remain the likely starting point for rendering the unfamiliar’’.