Chronicles
Brisbane-based artist Jenny Watson’s recent solo exhibition Jenny Watson: Chronicles at Griffith University Art Gallery (GUAG) brings together over twenty works by one of Australia’s most prolific painters. Building on Griffith Artworks 2005 exhibition Material Evidence: Jenny Watson Works on Fabric 1981-2005, curator Angela Goddard’s exhibition Chronicles provides a succinct and broader overview of Watson’s painting since the mid-1970s until the present. Taking a wider lens to Watson’s career, it highlights key developments in what the artist refers to as her ‘post-conceptual painting’.1
Chronicles spans two spaces. The first space includes a selection of the artist’s most recent work, a series of paintings featuring horses and a young girl depicted in Watson’s characteristic sparse and loose figurative style. Each is painted on pink and scarlet striped French furnishing velvet, with a separate accompanying text panel and a small readymade trinket placed on a shelf. The works are presented against a dramatic backdrop of scarlet red and positioned at the entrance to the main space, so the viewer is compelled to consider them before entering the exhibition and again upon exiting.
Within the main gallery there are no dividing walls, allowing the viewer to draw parallels between individual works and identify the changes in style that signify key developments. This is also reinforced by the chronological hang of the works around the perimeter of the space. The first wall features examples from the 1970s of the artist’s only three series rendered in a heavy oil impasto technique. These commence with House painting: Mont Albert (small version) (1976) and House painting: Mont Albert (large version) (1976-77), followed by three paintings from the painted page series completed over the summer of