Landscape

Barbara BRASH
Australian 1925–1998

Landscape c. 1959              
colour screenprint; edition of 25     
Geelong Gallery
Gift of Moira Eckel through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2017
© the estate of the artist

One of Brash’s earliest screenprints, Landscape is notable for its decidedly abstract nature and the multitude of screens required to produce layers in varying opacities. Projecting a nuanced, painterly effect, the principle of dynamic symmetry plays out in Landscape’s gently roiling whorls, with curved triangular motifs imparting an inward tension to its intersecting and overlapping components.

A tree trunk, diamond mesh tessellation and newsprint—elements of natural, constructed and cultural environments—can be discerned throughout. The inclusion of newsprint is an important stylistic and technical development in Brash’s practice. Achieved using a photochemical screenprint process, Brash cleverly translates one printed medium into another.

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Read by a voluntary Geelong Gallery Guide