BRIAN BLANCHFLOWER – CANOPIES

Image: Brian Blanchflower Canopy LI (Scelsi I - IV) from the series Canopy 2001 oil, wax medium, pumice powder, synthetic polymer paint on laminated hessian 222 x 984 cm overall Art Gallery of New South Wales Patrick White Bequest Fund 2013 © Brian Blanchflower Photograph Felicity Jenkins AGNSW

 

“The most important ‘ingredient’ in my paintings is that which is not painted: the unseen, the unknowable, the unnameable,” Brian Blanchflower explains.

Based in Western Australia since 1972, Blanchflower has produced a resonant and utterly mysterious body of paintings. How can such emotionally compelling results ensue from such consistently restricted means? Blanchflower is an exponent of what Robert Rosenblum called “the abstract sublime”. His achievement, comparable in fundamental ways to Rothko and late Monet, has no real parallel in the work of his contemporaries.

Blanchflower’s Canopy series, spanning thirty years of work, is surveyed in this exhibition, with paintings borrowed from national, state and private collections.

“Blanchflower’s art is not like a picture or painting, a contained or self sufficient image framed and closed off from the world,” explains Ian McLean. “Their concern is the nature of existence not painting. The greatness of Blanchflower’s work is self-evident: their sombre stature, like those giant statues of Rameses, is omnipresent.”

The exhibition is exclusive to the Drill Hall Gallery.