Kirsten Farrell, Madeline Kidd, Noël Skrzypczak
This exhibition of three young female painters has a three venue tour. It has been seen at Gallery Wren, Sydney; in Canberra; and will be shown at Linden Gallery, Melbourne in early 2004.
The artists graduated from the Canberra School of Art in 2000, and Magdalene Keany, in her catalogue essay, points out their engagement with the trajectories of pop art and modernism. That is, the works engage equally with issues of abstract painting (geometric and organic) and with references to media or personal imagery. Certainly these are valid points to make, and, equally, Keaney notes that ‘the theoretical constraints of linear stylistic inheritance or singular adherence to one movement or another are exuberantly denied’ by the artists. Exuberant is a good word in relation to these works, because they present a high degree of confidence and are conceptually sophisticated. Not leaden or bogged down by any particular methodology, they have an openness and freshness.
Kirsten Farrell’s paintings of tonally-related vectored stripes on panes of perspex, for instance, might at first glance seem simply an exercise in clever geometric abstraction. Strips of aqua, moss-green, gray; or blues and deep reds slide across the paintings surfaces, fanning crisply. In the installation at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space (a development of Farrell’s commended work in the Lempriere prize at Sydney’s Artspace), the modestly-scaled perspex panels are arranged in groups of nine, each placed on two nails so that the effect is reminiscent of the louvred windows of a Queenslander house, or more precisely of a factory. The stripes suggest Venetian blinds, and in this way, the works take on a narrative by default. But this is also the point: the openness of