PROFILE    EXHIBITIONS    NEWS & EVENTS    CONTACT US    SUBSCRIBE CURRENT EXHIBITION CATALOGUE UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS Exhibition launch with the artist to be opened by Professor Jeffrey Reigel Head of School of Languages and Cultures University of Sydney 2.30pm-4.30pm Saturday 25 February 2012 Artist in Conversation: Brett Bailey Art Month Sydney Contemporary Art Festival Event 2.30pm-4.00pm Saturday 3 March 2012 BRETT BAILEY - BEYOND WORDS What is beyond words? Painting with Ink on Canvas and Paper. Gao Xing Jian in his essay Return to Painting, 2001, puts it into words best: "A return to painting is a return to discover remaining and far from exhausted possibilities, and to unearth a personal means of expression. A return to painting makes art emerge from the shadow of historicism and dialectics, expresses the face art wore when time began, and allows the works to speak for themselves.” This exhibition showcases Bailey’s latest body of work, which illustrates his continued assimilation of Chinese and Japanese ideas of “painting the world” and the loving scrutiny, internalization and evocation of the Australian landscape. Bailey’s influences range from “the romantic landscape painting tradition of Europe, including Turner, Samuel Palmer and the Ancients to Chinese Literati painting and Japanese individualists.” In his work, Bailey has reinvented and appropriated many Asian techniques by including titanium mica in his pigments, which allow what he describes as a range of “reflective lustres and the inclusion of ‘weather’ in my images.” “I’m trying to create my own way of making vivid and plausible the phenomena and experiences of the natural world. It is an attempt to capture the essential meaning of the subject with forms deriving from my own unavoidable ideas and feelings about the subject. The truth of my own experience of nature,” said Bailey. BIOGRAPHY Brett Bailey was born in Melbourne and educated in Germany and England. Fascinated by Asian art as well as Asian history, philosophy and politics, he developed an understanding of mankind’s relationship to nature. In 1981 Brett travelled to Australia and Japan before returning to live in Australia permanently in 1983 when he painted his first Australian landscapes. He was a finalist in the 2009 Art Gallery of NSW Wynne Prize and his works are held in public, private and corporate collections in Australia, USA, Japan, UK and Ireland.