The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
One of Australia’s most intellectually tantalising and elusive artists, Diena Georgetti is the subject of a recent survey exhibition. While respected artists and art writers based in Brisbane recognised her talent early on and she was represented in the 9th Biennale of Sydney (1992), Georgetti has kept a low profile. Yet the artist has held critically acclaimed solo shows in contemporary art spaces around Australia in the past two decades and, following the Sydney Biennale, was included in the 1995 Australian Perspecta and the 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.
Georgetti aligned herself firstly with the alternative artists’ space network and preferred to keep her own counsel. Then when her singular work was recognised, Georgetti was taken up by Sutton Gallery, followed by Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne in the early 1990s with other dealers to follow (including Sarah Cottier and Darren Knight in Sydney, Milani in Brisbane and Hamish McKay in Wellington).
Hence, the monograph/exhibition catalogue put together by Max Delany of the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and Robert Leonard of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is welcome. For Brisbane audiences it answers the question ‘whatever happened to Diena Georgetti?’. We suspected, or at least knew in broad terms, that she had joined the southern exodus of young artists from Queensland in the early nineties: to Melbourne especially. This was after she had contributed not only to shows at the IMA but also at James Baker’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the vibrant yet short-lived artist-run ventures such as THAT Contemporary Artspace, Bureau Artspace, Aglassofwater and Arch Lane Public Art, in Brisbane.
I turned to early issues of Eyeline magazine to remind myself of when... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline