TarraWarra Biennial 2006
Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today

The inaugural TarraWarra Biennial, Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today, features works by seventeen Australian artists who share openness to their contemporary cultural and political milieu. They welcome the world into their studios, whether it be through the camera, the internet, music, film, literature, a cultural landscape and media. They embrace hybrid forms, draw on diverse inspirations, while also exploring their own painterly language. These works could not have been made in any other era. They are entirely of the present.

The exhibition highlights a process that is unique to painting: the artist, the painting, and their environment, occupy parallel, but related, ‘worlds’. Painters work in parallel with their own interior impulses and the external horizon of images and influences. They also work with the internal logic of the painting itself. The process is both directed and intuited. At times, the painting takes its own pathway, literally challenging its maker.

Painting today can be clustered and thought about in new ways. Artists roam freely among their art historical antecedents, across centuries, across cultures and within their own localities to find inspiration and consolidation. The art scene operates less in terms of the battlelines that were once fought between abstraction and figuration, modernism versus postmodernism, and more in terms of a network of exchange and parallel practices.

The artists in Parallel Lives are Richard Bell (QLD), Kate Beynon (VIC), Jon Cattapan (VIC), Nadine Christensen (VIC), Dale Frank (QLD), David Griggs (NSW), Brent Harris (VIC), Natalya Hughes (VIC), Aldo Iacobelli (SA), Raafat Ishak (VIC), Joanna Lamb (WA), Peter Maloney (ACT), Stieg Persson (VIC), Rusty Peters (WA), Ben Pushman (WA), Paul Uhlmann (WA) and Anne Wallace (QLD).