15 Susan Wald - Theatre Paintings & Monoprints

Susan Wald - Theatre Paintings & Monoprints

September 12 - October 10, 2015. Opening event Saturday Sept 12, 2-4pm.

Susan Wald’s, Theatre Paintings and Monoprints brings a new perspective to Australian art. Art Historian, Dr M.E. McGuire describes her work as; 'a European sensibility focused on the human condition in troubled, treacherous times…the oil paintings, of solitary figures estranged, are a further meditative abstraction using a limited range of colours and the direct force of her mark-making to sustain a drama as we approach these figures reaching out to us’.

The exhibition features eight major paintings, a series of small paintings and mono prints. The subject stems from two theatre productions, Elektra by Sophocles, directed by Adena Jacobs and The Exile Trilogy, written and directed by Barrie Kosky. Wald’s art pays homage to the best of classic and contemporary theatre. She acknowledges, “I believe that painting in the 21st Century can still be a potent medium – one that is able to speak about and reflect on our time.”

Jacobs, Theatre Director of Fraught Outfit writes that she and her collaborators were, ‘awestruck and moved by the work…we felt that it captured something unnameable in what we were trying to achieve…Susan was present throughout the entire rehearsal process, observing and responding through her drawings. She became a kind of visual dramaturge, documenting the inner workings and sensory experience of the process’.

Susan Wald quotes from her Metasenta Publication,
Theatre Monoprints 2012 – 2014:

An old passion of mine is the theatre…I try to find an equivalent and use the theatre as a springboard to develop my own personal visual language.

Samuel Beckett has been one of many influences from the theatre in my work over the last twenty years…reading Beckett’s work sends small shocks through my nervous system, it is like the skeletons of our humanity.

Day after day, I would draw, seeking to make concrete the elusive essence of emotion, form, and space.