The Church Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Western Australian artist Lisa Wolfgramm, at our new temporary gallery space in Northbridge. Widely regarded as one of Western Australia’s leading abstract painters, Lisa has been exhibiting locally for almost twenty years. Her work can be found in every prominent art collection in Western Australia, including the Art Gallery of WA, University of WA, Artbank, BankWest, Curtin, Murdoch and Edith Cowan Universities, Cruthers Collection, Department for Culture and the Arts, City of Joondalup, Royal Perth Hospital and the City of Fremantle.

Lisa’s practice engages with both the materiality and the performative aspects of painting. Her works are comprised of multiple layers of paint, systematically built up to suggest movement, depth and subtle shifts in colour. Whilst her earlier works referenced woven textiles through the application of paint in stripes and scraped lines, more recently she has utilised much smaller strokes and dabs to create shimmering painted surfaces and the illusion of depth. Starting with simple daubs of thinned paint, Lisa builds up the surface of each artwork, often in a variation on a grid formation, subtly changing the shape and direction of each layer to create different rhythms. Each of her canvasses can be read as the documentation of a performance, some of her recent works comprising up to fifty carefully-applied layers of translucent paint.

Born in Melbourne in 1959, Lisa moved to Perth in 1975 and graduated from WAIT, (now Curtin University), in 1987. She has taught painting at Edith Cowan University, TAFE and the Claremont School of Art over the past 12 years, acted in a mentoring role for Disadvantage and Disability in the Arts Australia (DADAA), as well as exhibiting extensively. This is her ninth solo exhibition, and it features a selection of major new works produced for last year’s Art Sydney 05, and not previously exhibited in Western Australia.

*prices valid 2006