Geoffrey Proud (b. 1946)

Fractured Fairytales - Paintings and Pastels

Eva Breuer Art Dealer is pleased to announce the opening of Geoffrey Proud Fractured Fairytales – Paintings and Pastels.

This exhibition of thirty recent paintings and pastels celebrates Geoffrey Proud’s exquisite imagery inspired by an imagined world of fractured fairytales, daydreams and childhood fantasies. Proud explores the light and shadow of this world in two parallel series of quirky, often surreal images, which often overlap and intertwine.

In paintings such as At Dawn’s First Light, Meg and the Girls Bade Them Farewell 2007 Proud populates this fairytale world with a mad array of Lewis-Carrol-like characters including a family of well dressed white rabbits. These paintings are full of light and executed in sensitive detail with highly glazed surfaces which lend the paintings an otherworldly quality. In The House of Millicent 2004 an enormous scarlet-ribboned girl brandishes an elongated puppet above a doll’s house, the residents of which huddle at the edge of a glassy lake.

Proud alternates between this magical realm and another realer world. The misty atmosphere and almost pointillist technique in Near the Orchard – a Study in Black 2008 is reminiscent of the French painter Georges Seurat. These two parallel worlds overlap in works such as The Lane in which Proud’s ‘Alice’ wanders through an unusual neighborhood of friendly mice with wheelbarrows and smiling scarf-wearing rabbits. The brush work alternates too, between spontaneous expressionist sweeps of white and more delicate detail in fresh rose buds which line the street.

Geoffrey Proud is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, many State and regional galleries as well as many other public and corporate collections including the Parliament House collection, Artbank, the IBM collection and the Elton John collection, London. Has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 1976 Sulman Prize and the 1990 Archibald prize for his portrait of writer Dorothy Hewett.

Geoffrey Proud (b. 1946)
At Dawn’s First Light, Meg and the Girls Bade them Farewell 2007
Oil on canvas
57.5 x 88cm
no.9848

Geoffrey Proud (b. 1946)
The House of Millicent 2004
Oil on canvas
89 x 100cm
no.9844

Geoffrey Proud (b. 1946)
Near the Orchard – a Study in Black 2008
Oil on canvas
89 x 120cm
no.9843

Geoffrey Proud (b. 1946)
The Lane 2007
Oil on canvas
120 x 88cm
no.9840

Exhibition:
Geoffrey Proud
Fractured Fairytales
Eva Breuer Art Dealer
83 Moncur Street Woollahra 2025

On View:
now and until Tuesday 12 August 2008

Further information & images:
Eva Breuer or Rob Maconachie
Tel: (02) 9362 0297, Fax (02) 9362 0318
Mobile: 0418 899 006
Email: art@evabreuerartdealer.com.au

Hours:
Tues-Fri 10-6, Sat 10-5, Sun 1-5
and by appointment