Two Exhibitions Together: Paintings and drawings... plus sculpture

OPENING NIGHT Tuesday 18 November 6pm to 8pm

"There are two aspects of this extraordinary exhibition that demand to be addressed. The first is the actual specificity of the works, of the two large paintings - Rough Justice (just as we promised) and Going Home (a long time overdue) as well as the smaller paintings and drawings that are related to the larger works. The second, which is much more demanding, concerns the relation between all the works. To configure the second one as a question: what is the nature of the relation of these small works to the larger paintings?"

- Excerpt from catalogue essay The Scenes of Peter Neilson by Andrew Benjamin, Honorary Professor in the School of Communication and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne

“The relationship between Neilson’s large and small paintings illuminates a fundamental paradox in visual representation: the tension between openness and closure. The larger paintings, with their complex narratives and multiple entry points, invite prolonged contemplation and multiple interpretations. They are what Umberto Eco would recognise as “open works”—texts that actively involve the viewer in their completion, allowing meaning to circulate and proliferate across the painted surface.

The small paintings, by contrast, impose a form of closure. They direct attention, limit scope, provide what appears to be definitive statements about particular moments or objects. Yet this apparent definitiveness conceals a deeper violence: the cut-in doesn’t merely isolate but transforms, arresting movement and fixing what was fluid.”

- Excerpt from catalogue essay Peter Neilson's Cinematic Vignettes and the Violence of the Cut-in by Iqbal Barkat, Senior Lecturer in Screen Production at Macquarie University & Maree Delofski, Adjunct Senior Fellow at Macquarie University