China Heights is pleased to announce a major new body of work by 2014 Wynne finalist, Max Berry. ‘The Inwardness of Place’ presents a series of works which continue to explore the question of what constitutes place, by extending upon his 2013 body of work ‘Which Way Home’ and further exploring and evoking the artist’s prominent subject matter and defining interest in landscape.
Marking a departure in approach to his previous work, Berry’s interest in landscape has turned from its fantastical imaging to its direct experience, with the artist venturing out of his studio on excursions to locations throughout rural Australia. Berry has distilled something of these locations into paintings that are vivid in colour and decisive in stroke. Be it a view of rolling hills, an immense horizon line, a solitary tree, a river or a dam, each painting offers the viewer a vignette, an invitation to experience a moment in time and space where the artist once stood.
Significantly for this collection of works, Berry first translated his experience through photography, capturing a days shifting light, or a detail of interest through the rich impression of film which became a basis to reinterpret these moments through the poetic potentials offered by paint. The works in ‘The Inwardness of Place’ are decidedly nostalgic and sting with emotion. In this way each work seems to encourage a particular quality or feeling that lingers and marks its own time which may suggest that the answer to what constitutes place exists in each person’s encounter, residing within.